Painting over an existing painting - help pls

Hi Lucy big welcome. Whatever else that is a nice frame. Like your perseverance trying to resurrect this support. As you seem very sure it's not acrylic I agree as you would just be able to clean and paint over it. . I can't think it is gouache( poster paint) that would have scrubbed off so it does look to be oil , though we have experts on here who I am sure will help you more than I can. You could try a scrub with sandpaper! . Or as you suggest paint over it with an undercoat. You are not losing anything as it was a freebie and that really looks a nice frame . Keep us updated on what happens .

I can't tell from the original picture if it was oil or whatever else it might have been, but at a guess it's either oil or acrylic. If it is oil, the very strong probability is that whatever you do, sooner or later your paint film will fail - it'll bubble, and if you pick at the bubble it will peel away in strips. If you just leave it, the bubble will gradually grow and the paint film will begin to hang on the support like some blister on a bicyclist's backside.... I suspect it wasn't an acrylic for two reasons - one, you're confident that it isn't, and that's good enough for me! And two, it wouldn't have reacted as you describe (unless - perhaps - it was interactive acrylic; but the date's wrong for that). Given the choice you had, I would have said take the board out of the rather nice frame and insert another, then paint away. Or, use the board to play about with, but don't expect it to last. As it is, if the painting falls to bits you've still got the frame and can use it for something else, so all is far from lost. It's hardly ever worth painting over an old oil painting though, even in oil: in acrylic, I'm afraid it's just asking for the inevitability of trouble; in oil, you might be more fortunate but the chances of cracking are quite strong. I have a few paintings I'd not sell, because I don't have enough faith in their longevity, in oil over oil - you probably won't have trouble with those, especially if you know how much oil or whatever was used in the original, if you scrape as much of it as you can get off, sand them down, then perhaps lay a thin coat of lead white if available over the top and start again in colour, ideally using stand oil or even Liquin (or a product called Oleogel, if you can find it in the UK). But acrylic just won't adhere to oil for long, no matter how old the oil is. One note of possible comfort - it COULD have been gouache: that might react as you describe given its age, and it should be OK to paint over if you've removed as much of the original painting as possible. The possibility only occurs to me because I wouldn't necessarily have expected 14 year old oil paint to soften - oil hardens over time, and if all you did was apply warm soapy water and then sugar soap.... then emulsion paint.... now then; what sort of emulsion paint (plot thickens all the time here...). Probably not oil-based, because most emulsion these days isn't - and you wouldn't be daft enough anyway to think of painting in acrylic over an oil emulsion. Actually the question that strikes me is - what did the original painting LOOK as if it was? Were the colours quite rich (leaving aside the way they were applied etc), was there a hint of sheen, did it retain the marks of the brush - oil usually does, acrylic rarely? In short - I'd have knocked the old board out of the frame and put a new on in there, which is what it's taken me all these words to say!

Just taken a closer look at the original photo - that's been painted over something else, hasn't it? The paint slops over the frame: are you sure there wasn't another painting (or print) underneath? And Gawd knows what that might have been....

I know, it's not cheap is it? I like to use local art stores - although my nearest one is about 8 miles away, and I don't drive either. I bought a tube of Pthalo Green acrylic a couple of weeks ago (don't tell Syd, one of our members: he just hates the colour; frankly, so do I - but there are times when nothing else is strong enough). Anyway, I then looked at the online price for the very same paint - Cryla heavy bodied acrylic - and I could have got it from Art Discount (Grantham's), for nearly £3 less .... it's really hard to stay loyal to local art stores, and of course it's not their fault, when online retailers can undercut them so dramatically. Far be it from me to encourage the trend to online, but on the other hand one does have to be a bit realistic - so I can recommend the following companies: Art Discount, Grantham's; Discount Art, Ken Bromley Art Supplies; Jacksons Art (if they haven't got it, it probably doesn't exist); and Chromacolour International, who make a form of acrylic that just has a certain something that lifts your work out of what you could normally hope to achieve; other companies - which I've not used - are Cass Arts; Great Art, Gerstaecker; Pegasus Arts .... and there are many more, as doubtless other Forum members will hasten to tell you. I prefer to use those that cater to the professional, because while there are cut-price suppliers for the hobby market the quality isn't always there - this is especially true of canvas: there is some very nasty stuff out there claiming to be artists' canvas. You already have a cupboard full of materials, happily: but you'll be needing to supplement your stash, and having been out of circulation for a while may find some of those suggestions useful.

I was thinking of The Range when I mentioned cheap canvas - if it's canvas you like to work on most, try The Canvas Store: good quality canvases by Loxley are well worth trying. Fine for acrylics, there's a little more concern about stretched canvas with oil - in the considerably longer term. But cheap canvas is horrid stuff - thin, sagging, and not fit for your superb artworks! Maybe there's nothing wrong with using it to make studies on, but I always fear that I might produce something a bit better than average, on a worse than average canvas - then I'm stuck with the thing.. So I like to work on a better quality support, and recommend you do the same.

I like texture Lucy. I don't think there is any problem on putting it on the gallery as you are not selling it. You can just say it was inspired by a well-known print! However, I really like the style.

I've just seen this in the gallery Lucy and it looks tremendous! I like it very much and I'm glad you did post it so we could see how good it is.