A little while ago, I started seeing YouTube artists working on art that they found at the thrift store. It was an interesting concept — find someone else’s artwork, add details, and behold, new art!
I went to the thrift store myself and struggled to find anything to work on until I got this painting of a woman reaching up as she walked through an orchard. It reminded me of a lamp in my grandmother’s living room that had a similarly dressed lady gathering grain. I decided to give her some patterned wings to add some whimsy to the otherwise kind of dreary, earth-toned piece.
Watch the video to see how I made-over the thrift store art, and check out my tips below before you start your own masterpiece.
Tips for Transforming Your Thrift Store Artwork:
Know Your Art Mediums
When selecting a piece to paint over, you’ll need to first know what the original painting was created with. Acrylics will not stick to oil-based paints, so you’ll have to work with oil paints if you are painting over an oil painting. Acrylics work well over other acrylics. For the painting in the video, it was varnished with a very slick varnish and was pretty high gloss, so I had to use many layers of acrylics to cover the original paint colors, but I left the wings transparent, so that took a less opaque paint.
For varnished paintings, you may want to prep the surface that you plan on painting with a clear gesso to add some grit to the surface.
I also found that oil pastels adhered to varnished surfaces really well.
Know Your Art Journey
Although I went pretty quickly through the process, I would recommend planning out your thrift store artwork transformation. Take a picture of your artwork with your phone or tablet, then you can sketch over the top of the piece to plan out your additions. This would have saved me a lot of time while I tried to figure out what to sketch onto my artwork.
Try a Variety of Mediums
Don’t let the rules dictate what you can and cannot add to the painting. Oil pastel outlines completely transformed my attempt and made it look really funky and cool. Think about using unconventional tools for your painting, like oil pastels, chalk pastels, fabric, collage, water-soluble crayons, or markers. I thought it would be cool to add fabric to the women’s dress in the painting, but my own creative muse took me elsewhere.
Try for Whimsy, Not for Realism
Most of the examples I saw of artists working on thrift store art were working to create a juxtaposition (placing something extremely different in the painting to create an opposites effect). They were drawing giant cats on landscapes, or adding sea monsters to ocean scenes. In each example I found, they sought to add something unique that stood out from the original painting, rather than matching what was already there.
In trying to mix colors and paint on this artwork, I can verify that it is extremely difficult to paint over an existing painting and make it look like a convincing replica. Instead, have fun with the artwork and try to create something wholly new with the artwork.
