I have this painting shown above that I created. Would you believe that I painted over this piece? Why would I go through all of that work and then paint over it?

Great question.

The painting is done as it is and lovely. Focusing on the colors choices, larger shapes and textures is one way of creating an abstract piece. And just how abstract you want your work to be is very personal. How much do you want your own version to be recognizable as for example a landscape? How much of a connection to reality would you like our own work to reflect?

For many of us, we want to go deeper into the work of abstraction. Having an underpainting of a more realistic abstract piece like we just created, and then taking it a few steps more toward abstraction is another approach. This is also a good tool to have for many of us that end up with “too much reality” in our work.

I’m going to share a few tools on how I go about making this piece more abstract, and then see the finished images.

In the first example (shown below) I took some pumice gel (an acrylic based gel) and put a layer of the acrylic pumice gel on top of a photo to see how I could work the painting further into abstraction. You certainly don’t need to use the acrylic pumice gel. If you are painting additional acrylic layers over your acrylic piece you can just paint right on top of it if you choose! The pumice gel just adds some extra texture.

Here is the first reworking of the painting.

In the second piece I added a layer of oil baed cold wax on top of the dried acrylic painting. This is a step to take if you want to paint oil based paints on top of the dried acrylic piece.

Can you paint oil and cold wax directly on top of a dried acrylic underlay?

YES. I added this extra step of a layer of pure cold wax because I was working on a photo copy and wanted to make sure the paints stuck to the page:)

Here is the second reworking of the painting. I turned it upside down and used oil and cold wax to create a different vantage point. I added hints of magenta back into the final piece shown below.

Have you ever tried painting over your art to make it more abstract? It’s such a fun process and you can really let your creativity fly when doing so. Let me know if the comments if you’ve ever done this and if not, if you’ll ever give it a try!