I've been having some fun picking up prints or mass-produced art pieces and enhancing them so they are more my style . . . sometimes it means adding an accent color that fits into a room I'm reimagining; sometimes it's removing or replacing part of a painting that doesn't appeal to me; sometimes its just adding texture of some kind to add more interest.

I could just start from scratch and paint my own paintings, but this is a bit of a challenge - to use what I like, discard what I don't, and add my own style. For me, that usually means adding more texture. Of course this is not something I could enter into an art show since it's not all original to me - unless I end up painting a totally different painting over the top of a canvas I don't care for. (Like the Birch trees in the post "Texture - More Texture!")

Here's one of my favorites. I bought this mass produced acrylic painting several years ago when I wanted to add some nautical charm in the summer. The painting was inexpensive so I bought it even though it bugged me that the lighthouse went right to the top of the page. Poor composition . . . I always like margin in my paintings. I also wasn't real fond of the rowboat in the foreground - my eyes kept going there instead of to the rest of the painting.

I decided to start by blocking out the parts of the painting I didn't like. As I got started, I decided to take out some of the buildings as well . . .

I began to paint in the trees, add more sand where the boat was, and work on part of the sky . . .

Then it was time for the lighthouse . . . I gave it a lot more character than the original and started to add some torn paper to "texture it up!"

A little more paint, a little more texture in other places . . .

A bit more here - a lot more there . . . and Viola!

Here is my final piece on my piano.