Upgrading Your Art Prints In a few EASY Steps
Something that is really simple to do to your art prints is adding texture to make it look like an oil painting! You can do this with any print of any size really, but obviously, this will look best on a print of a pre-existing painting to give off that authentic look, but without the price tag.
If you didn’t know this, the MET Museum has an online archive called MET Open Access, that has free images for use where you can download thousands of pictures of art and paintings from literally every historic era. In my case, I typed in still life, and found this one called ‘Summer Flowers’ by Henri Fantin-Latour in 1800. I got it printed at my local print shop.
To get the textured effect that I am going for, I am going in with a heavy gel medium in a gloss finish that I found at my local craft store. A regular gloss finish won’t hold it’s shape well enough and an EXTRA heavy gloss or matte finish dries more opaque and will ruin the authentic affect.
With a stiff bristled brush, I’m just painting the gel on in thin layers, creating a cross hatched pattern by flipping my brush back and forth to mimic the oil on canvas. Once I started to get to the more detailed areas, like the flowers, I just followed the brush strokes of the original painting.
TIP: to make it look more convincing, glue the image to a board or MDF sheet to avoid the paper from bubbling when you add the gel on top.
Once it’s completely dried, I put it into a frame and hung it up and it was a total game changer to the print! Here are the final results, I love it because it just adds a little more interest to the piece and all in all looks for expensive and luxe.
