Faux painting

Last updated September 03, 2023

Faux painting or faux finishing are terms used to describe decorative paint finishes that replicate the appearance of materials such as marble, wood or stone.^[1] The term comes from the French word faux , meaning false, as these techniques started as a form of replicating materials such as marble and wood with paint, but has subsequently come to encompass many other decorative finishes for walls and furniture including simulating recognisable textures and surfaces.

History

Faux finishing has been used for millennia, from cave painting to the tombs of ancient Egypt, but what we generally think of as faux finishing in the decorative arts began with plaster and stucco finishes in Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago.

Faux painting became popular in classical times in the forms of faux marble, faux wood, and trompe-l'œil murals. Artists would apprentice for 10 years or more with a master faux painter before working on their own. Great recognition was awarded to artists who could actually trick viewers into believing their work was the real thing.

The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, in discussing the work of house and decorative painters, describes a number of faux-finishes including marbleizing and graining.^[2] Faux painting has continued to be popular throughout the ages, but experienced major resurgences in the neoclassical revival of the nineteenth century and the Art Deco styles of the 1920s. During the recent history of decorative painting, faux finishing has been mainly used in commercial and public spaces.

20th century revival

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, faux finishing saw another revival, as wallpaper began to fall out of fashion. At this point, faux painting became popular in home environments, with high-end homes leading the trend. While it can be quite expensive to hire a professional faux finisher ($80.00/hr.), many faux painting methods are thought to be simple enough for a beginning home owner to create with a little instruction. Some professionally applied finishes in the high-end, Bay-Area homes of northern California, for example, were as simple as oil glaze, oil-based paint or penetrol or as complicated as applications with peacock feathers and 4 different colors applied using 4 different techniques.

In modern-day faux finishing, there are two major processes used. Glaze work involves using a translucent mixture of paint and glaze applied with a brush, roller, rag, or sponge, and often mimics textures, but it is always smooth to the touch. Plaster work can be done with tinted plasters, or washed over with earth pigments, and is generally applied with a trowel or spatula. The finished result can be either flat to the touch or textured.

Faux finishes

Marbleizing or faux marbling is used to make walls and furniture look like real marble. This can be done using either plaster or glaze techniques.
Fresco is a simple technique, uses mixtures of tint and joint compound to add mottled color and subtle texture to plain walls,
Graining, wood graining, or faux bois (French for "fake wood") is often used to imitate exotic or hard-to-find wood varieties.
Trompe-l'œil , "fool the eye" in French, is a realistic painting technique often used in murals, and to create architectural details as well as depth and 3 dimensionality.
Venetian plaster is a smooth and often shiny plaster design that appears textured but is smooth to the touch. Venetian plaster is one of the most traditional plaster decorations. Authentic Venetian Plaster is made from marble dust and ground up limestone.
Color wash is a free-form finish that creates subtle variations of color using multiple hues of glaze blended together with a paint brush.
Strié, from the French for "stripe" or "streak", is a glazing technique that creates soft thin streaks of color using a paint brush. It is a technique often used to simulate fabrics such as linen and denim.
Rag painting or ragging is a glazing technique using twisted or bunched up rags to create a textural pattern.
Sponging is a free-form finish achieved by applying glaze to the wall by dabbing a sea sponge, in various shapes to achieve either simple design (resembling the wall papers) and more sophisticated ones.

Related Research Articles

A mural is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage.

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of the world. The advantages of oil for painting images include "greater flexibility, richer and denser colour, the use of layers, and a wider range from light to dark". But the process is slower, especially when one layer of paint needs to be allowed to dry before another is applied.

Trompe-l'œil is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Trompe l'œil, which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into perceiving painted objects or spaces as real. Forced perspective is a related illusion in architecture.

Gilding is a decorative technique for applying a very thin coating of gold over solid surfaces such as metal, wood, porcelain, or stone. A gilded object is also described as "gilt". Where metal is gilded, the metal below was traditionally silver in the West, to make silver-gilt objects, but gilt-bronze is commonly used in China, and also called ormolu if it is Western. Methods of gilding include hand application and gluing, typically of gold leaf, chemical gilding, and electroplating, the last also called gold plating. Parcel-gilt objects are only gilded over part of their surfaces. This may mean that all of the inside, and none of the outside, of a chalice or similar vessel is gilded, or that patterns or images are made up by using a combination of gilt and ungilted areas.

Stucco or render is a construction material made of aggregates, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as a decorative coating for walls and ceilings, exterior walls, and as a sculptural and artistic material in architecture. Stucco can be applied on construction materials such as metal, expanded metal lath, concrete, cinder block, or clay brick and adobe for decorative and structural purposes.

Slipware is pottery identified by its primary decorating process where slip is placed onto the leather-hard (semi-hardened) clay body surface before firing by dipping, painting or splashing. Slip is an aqueous suspension of a clay body, which is a mixture of clays and other minerals such as quartz, feldspar and mica. The slip placed onto a wet or leather-hard clay body surface by a variety of techniques including dipping, painting, piping or splashing. Slipware is the pottery on which slip has been applied either for glazing or decoration. Slip is liquified clay or clay slurry, with no fixed ratio of water and clay, which is used either for joining pottery pieces together by slip casting with mould, glazing or decorating the pottery by painting or dipping the pottery with slip.

Graining is the practice of imitating wood grain on a non-wood surface, or on relatively undesirable wood surface, in order to give it the appearance of a rare or higher quality wood, thereby increase that surface's aesthetic appeal. Graining was common in the 19th century, as people were keen on imitating hard, expensive woods by applying a superficial layer of paint onto soft, inexpensive woods or other hard surfaces. Graining can be accomplished using either rudimentary tools or highly specialized tools. A specialized thick brush used for graining is often called a mottler. Fan brushes, floggers, softening brushes, texture combs and even fingers are used to create various effects. The painting is carried out in layers, with the first layer being a base. Today that is usually done with latex paint in a gold or orange or tan tone, depending on the type of wood the artist is aiming to imitat. A second layer of tempera or thinned paint is applied over the dry base, by means of a sponge or large inexpensive brush. During the 19th century, however, brushes were more commonly used. It can also be applied on bricks and brass, as is more common today.

Plasterwork is construction or ornamentation done with plaster, such as a layer of plaster on an interior or exterior wall structure, or plaster decorative moldings on ceilings or walls. This is also sometimes called pargeting. The process of creating plasterwork, called plastering or rendering, has been used in building construction for centuries. For the art history of three-dimensional plaster, see stucco.

A glaze is a thin transparent or semi-transparent layer on a painting which modifies the appearance of the underlying paint layer. Glazes can change the chroma, value, hue and texture of a surface. Glazes consist of a great amount of binding medium in relation to a very small amount of pigment. Drying time will depend on the amount and type of paint medium used in the glaze. The medium, base, or vehicle is the mixture to which the dry pigment is added. Different media can increase or decrease the rate at which oil paints dry.

Distressing in the decorative arts is the activity of making a piece of furniture or object appear aged and older, giving it a "weathered look". There are many methods to produce an appearance of age and wear. Distressing is viewed as a refinishing technique although it is the opposite of finishing in a traditional sense. In distressing, the object's finish is intentionally destroyed or manipulated to look less than perfect, such as with sandpaper or paint stripper. For example, the artisan often removes some but not all of the paint, leaving proof of several layers of paint speckled over wood grain underneath. This becomes the "finished" piece.

Faux bois refers to the artistic imitation of wood or wood grains in various media. The craft has roots in the Renaissance with trompe-l'œil. It was probably first crafted with concrete using an iron armature by garden craftsmen in France called "rocailleurs" using common iron materials: rods, barrel bands, and chicken wire.

A wash is a term for a visual arts technique resulting in a semi-transparent layer of colour. A wash of diluted ink or watercolor paint applied in combination with drawing is called pen and wash, wash drawing, or ink and wash. Normally only one or two colours of wash are used; if more colours are used the result is likely to be classified as a full watercolor painting.

Polished plaster is a term for the finish of some plasters and for the description of new and updated forms of traditional Italian plaster finishes. The term covers a whole range of decorative plaster finishes, from the very highly polished Venetian plaster and Marmorino to the rugged look of textured polished plasters. Polished plaster itself tends to consist of slaked lime, marble dust, and/or marble chips, which give each plaster its distinctive look. A lime-based polished plaster may contain over 40% of marble powder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Color wash</span>

A color wash is a popular technique in faux painting using paint thinned out with glaze to create a subtle wash of color over walls or other surfaces.

Strié is a popular form of faux painting using glaze and paint brushes to create a soft natural striped texture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rag painting</span> Creating surface finish with rags

Rag painting or ragging is a form of faux painting using paint thinned out with glaze and old rags to create a lively texture on walls and other surfaces.

Acrylic painting techniques are different styles of manipulating and working with polymer-based acrylic paints. Acrylics differ from oil paints in that they have shorter drying times and are soluble in water. These types of paint eliminate the need for turpentine and gesso, and can be applied directly onto canvas. Aside from painting with concentrated color paints, acrylics can also be watered down to a consistency that can be poured or used for glazes.

Fruit Dish and Glass (1912), by Georges Braque, is the first papier collé. Braque and Pablo Picasso made many other works in this medium, which is generally credited as a key turning point in Cubism.

References

↑ Shekhar, R.K.C. (2005) Academic Dictionary of Architecture . Delhi: Isha Books, p. 110. ISBN 9788182051850
↑ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Painter-work" . Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 20 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 457–459.

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[1] Shekhar, R.K.C. (2005) Academic Dictionary of Architecture . Delhi: Isha Books, p. 110. ISBN 9788182051850

[2] Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Painter-work" . Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 20 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 457–459.

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