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Cost: $ $ $ $ $

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Time: 2h00

3D art in a shadow box!
I recently was inspired to get back into painting like I used to, but I needed a good excuse to sit and paint the day away. I can't just paint for painting sake. So I decided to create a painting for my dear friends Lindsay and Blake's daughter Lane (who was turning 1 the next week). Her room is being re-decorated to a woodland theme so I wanted to take the painting in that direction, obviously. I had also seen stacked paintings widespread lately and wanted to try my own take.

My favorite medium to paint in is watercolor...possibly because it is so forgiving and also very soft. You can make a mistake and it never looks like a mistake. I do miss painting in oils and acrylics, but I thought this was a good project to start.

Here's where I started....

Posted by violet s. from Indianapolis, Indiana, United States • Published 7th January 2013 • See violet s.'s 7 projects »

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Amanda P. added Shadow Box Painting to Drawing and Painting 17 Jun 22:40
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Step 1
I painted the back layer first (the easiest one). I only had to paint down to a certain level on the page since I knew it would be covered up by the next layer. First was my sky.
Step 2
I never had a certain amount of layers in mind, but I just judged as I moved along. Here are the first 3 layers. Sky-Mountains-Hill. I cut each layer out of the watercolor paper and layed them down in order to see where my next layer should start. You can do as many layers as you want!
Step 3
I wanted to incorporate different animals in all the layers.
Step 4
After it was all finished, I layered them up in the order and taped pieces of cardboard to the back of each paper and then further taped those pieces to the layer below. This kept them spread out from eachother achieving the 3D look. You may find double sided sticky tape to work well for this. Since it's hidden, it's not important how it looks below the layers ;)
Step 5
I finished it off and cut the layers to fit the width and height of my shadow box! DONE!