Trompe Loeil
(pronounced tromp-loy)

An alternative to stencils
In addition to multilayered stencils, there are other aids that can help you produce realistic murals without free-handing the entire scene, such as the instructional videos and CDs produced by Andrea Tober, a self-taught artist and instructor who lives just outside of Columbia, Maryland, with her husband (“the technical brain behind the entire thing”) and daughter.

Tober, who has a business law degree, got into the decorative painting business nine years ago after visitors oohed and ahhed over a nursery she had painted for her daughter. One thing led to another and she began painting private homes, then moved into the commercial arena and finally hooked up with Royals and began teaching a tromp l’oeil class. Today, she’s so busy teaching trompe l’oeil throughout this country and Canada and working with her husband to produce teaching aids that she no longer handles painting contracts.

The multimedia CDs made by the Tobers’ company, A Matter of Perception, focus on perspective mural projects for artists at all levels. Video clips guide artists every step of the way, from surface preparation and layout to varnishing and finishing touches. No detail is overlooked. “On one CD, for instance, there’s a video clip showing how to paint the eye of a leopard from beginning to end,” Tober says.

“Our CDs are geared to meet all the different learning styles out there,” Tober says.

Artists can view full-color photographs at sizes up to 800 percent for a closer look, and print supply lists, individual pages and full-size patterns for easy reference. “The patterns for all the objects in a particular mural can be printed out and pieced together through registration marks,” she notes, which are particularly helpful for those who strive to be mathematically precise.

Acknowledging that most mural artists work from projectors or overheads, Tober points out there are line drawings and 35 mm slides included so artists can project the image onto the wall and trace complicated objects. Unlike the rigid stencil, you can easily modify the image. “You can adjust the focus and move back and forth until you get the right size. Then you trace the different elements and start coloring them in like a paint-by-number,” Tober says.

In addition to the video and CDs, the Tobers’ company also produces its Grid Maker, a software program that allows the user to create perspective grids of any size and orientation. The artist just punches in the pertinent information-such as the picture dimensions, the viewer distance, the vanishing point-and the program produces a properly calculated grid. It can be used to represent such things as 12-inch-wide tiles that continue to get smaller and smaller until they virtually disappear.

When the hand is quicker than the eye
Jeff Raum of Moorpark, California, an accomplished trompe l’oeil muralist who is featured regularly on “The Christopher Lowell Show” on the Discovery Channel, says that a true trompe l’oeil painting is rather shallow and doesn’t have a great depth of field.

“It should have maybe a foot in depth. You want to be able to move a little bit and still not have lost perspective. Move and it doesn’t give away that it’s a flat wall,” says Raum, who holds a degree in commercial design.

“A true trompe l’oeil is a niche or a cabinet with oddities in it, or it can be something in front of a picture like a painting with a drape around it,” he says, adding that drapery is one of his specialties. “Anything with a great deal of depth, like a landscape or architectural drawing that goes way back in perspective and looks photographic, isn’t trompe. It doesn’t fool me because as soon as you move the illusion is lost. The most ideal place for a trompe l’oeil is at the end of a hallway where the viewer cannot move laterally.”

Raum — whose successful business, Muracles, boasts of such clients as Gucci, I. Magnum, the Las Vegas Hilton and the Lexor — says he steers away from stencils (“I only use them in the foreground”) and prefers to draw freehand to get the look he desires. And it pays off: He charges $700 a day to create a trompe l’oeil, $600 for murals and $400 for faux finishing. On average, an 8-by-10 foot mural runs between $3,000 and $7,000.

His advice to trompe l’oeil wanna-bes? “You have to be a good drawer. You need to study the object you’re going to paint. When you’re creating a trompe l’oeil painting, the best thing is to actually have the object in front of you so you can paint from real life. A photograph will flatten it out some, and photos don’t catch the nuances and little oddities of an object. You can’t see how the light will actually fall on it,” Raum says.

All in all, he explains, “Trompe l’oeil is the most difficult form of art. It’s not arbitrary. It’s not subjective. There’s no room for interpretation.” Simply put, it’s got to look real to do the trick.