Wall art

Paint, metal and ageing

Give the raised paint a type and a varnish, turn gold, silver or copper colours into real metal, and age the painting a little.

Matelume Guide. Upcoming features are marked separately.

The last three Craft steps finish the artwork's surface. Bumped paint decides what the raised paint is like, Metal colours turns metallic colours into real metal, and Art imperfections ages the painting itself. None of them changes the colours of your picture, except where you choose metal or an imperfection that changes colour.

Bumped paint

The raised paint gets a type, the way a fabric's raised parts get a stitch type. A type changes the relief and the gloss; the colours stay your painting's. On a print on canvas, the same types shape the clear gel.

• From the brushwork: the brush marks in your image stand up. This is the start, with no control of its own.
• Bristle strokes: long strokes with bristle grooves. Stroke length, 6 to 60 mm.
• Short dabs: short thick dabs, each with a ridge where the brush lifted. Dab size, 3 to 25 mm.
• Palette knife: flat smooth planes with sharp ridges where the knife stopped. Knife width, 8 to 80 mm.
• Dots: round domed dots side by side, like pointillism. Dot size, 1 to 10 mm.
• Smooth, poured: soft rounded pools with no marks, and glossy. Softness, 2 to 30 mm.
• Textured gel: a grainy paste, like modelling paste, and matte. Grain size, 0.3 to 4 mm.

Strokes, dabs and the knife also have Direction: Follows the painting lays the marks the way the painting runs; One direction lays them at one Angle, 0 to 180°. Thickest paint is here again, so you can set the height and the type together. Where dots, dabs, strokes or the knife leave no mark, the thin paint and the canvas show between them.

The picture swings from the side view back up to the top, then moves in to a close look from above, lit low. Each change lands there as soon as its maps are made. Sizes are real millimetres, so a type reads the same on any painting size.

Varnish

Varnish sets the gloss of the whole artwork:

• None: the paint keeps its own gloss, thick paint shinier than thin.
• Matte, Satin or Gloss: evens the whole artwork's gloss out towards that finish. The relief stays.

The varnish never dulls your metal colours. On a print on canvas with nothing picked in What gets bumped, the step shows only the varnish. A print on paper skips this step and has no varnish: it usually sits behind glass.

Metal colours

This step works on every kind of artwork. Is anything in your picture gold, silver or copper: leaf, foil or metallic paint? Make those colours real metal.

1. Under The colours of your artwork, click a swatch. The swatches are your artwork's main colours. An outlined swatch is metal; click it again to make it paint.
2. Under The metal, choose Metal: As in the photo keeps your image's colour, brightened to a metal's (a warm gold stays warm), while Gold, Silver and Copper use the true metal's colour and keep your image's shading.
3. Set Shine, from 0 to 100 %: low is a soft satin leaf, high a polished mirror.

The picture shows the Metalness map: white is metal, black is paint, with the share of the artwork that is metal. The 3D view opens beside it, because metal only comes alive in the light: turn the artwork, or switch on Path tracing, and watch it catch the reflections. The metal goes into your export as the Metalness map and in the GLB and FBX materials.

Art imperfections

The painting itself, aged a little. Each card has its own switch, starts at 0 % when you switch it on, and has its own Strength, 0 to 100 %.

They change the colour and the gloss only: the relief stays. The picture shows each changed map before and with them, with the measured change. The frame and the glass get their own ageing later, in Frame imperfections. Everything you switch on goes into your export at the strength you set.

Tip: Keep imperfections subtle. They are meant as the quiet variation of a real artwork, never as damage.