78 People Who Personalized Thrifted Paintings By Adding In Something Funny Or Unexpected (New Pics)

Full disclosure, we absolutely love art, and we dabble in it in our spare time. It’s true that, among other hobbies, we like to take out our easel, brushes, and paint from time to time and have a go at painting on a canvas.

And though we might not be stellar or even particularly good, it’s a relaxing hobby and gives us a creative outlet. Even though we fail more often than not, we understand that we’re slowly improving. Painting is like any other skill. Namely, you’ll get better at it with practice.

However, just like with any other skill, making mistakes, messing up, and failing isn’t all that pleasant to deal with. And yet, it’s inevitable that on your way to learning something new, you’ll fail over and over (and over) again. So, what really helps is reframing how you see your mistakes.

Instead of viewing your less-than-perfect results as a personal failure, try to perceive them as opportunities for growth and personal development. In other words, you don’t win or lose, you either win or you learn.

As Psychology Today explains, a growth mindset is the belief that an individual’s capacities and talents can be improved over time. It’s the idea that, over time, your efforts allow you to improve.

On the flip side, having a fixed mindset suggests that you believe a person’s capacity to learn and improve can’t be meaningfully developed.

According to Psychology Today, individuals with a fixed mindset think they’re not good at anything, believe they always fail, and think that others always do better.

“They are convinced that they can’t learn anything new, and that it’s far too late for them to try because they will fail anyway. They feel they struggle too much in their tasks, and they feel inferior by the seemingly easy success of the people around them.”

However, with consistent effort, smart work, and focus, and learning from your mistakes, you can set out to achieve pretty much anything that you envision. Sure, luck plays an important role in your art career taking off, too, but you can certainly improve your painting skills and enjoy success.

Persistence is what eventually leads to success in all areas of life.

The ‘Repaintings’ online community has been around for a while now. It was first created over a decade ago, back in mid-February of 2014.

Currently, the subreddit gets around 1.6k visitors every week, as well as around 11 weekly contributions. That’s a lot of people either repainting paintings or sharing their love of them.

According to the moderator team running the subreddit, the community is all about “changing the context or content of an existing artwork.”

They suggest that you go “find a painting at a garage sale, thrift store, or in the trash and repaint it. Add some monsters! Lasers? Before and After pics are encouraged.”

With that in mind, it’s important to stress that ‘Repaintings’ is a subreddit dedicated solely to, well, repainting existing paintings. And so, original works of art, no matter how brilliant and amazing, shouldn’t be posted here. There are plenty of other great art-focused communities where you can share your original art.

What’s more, the online community is all about the physical act of painting. That means that there’s no room for sharing digital works here, even if you have awesome skills in that area. You can only share photos of traditionally repainted works on ‘Repaintings,’ where you edited them with real, physical paint.

Furthermore, you aren’t allowed to monetize your (re)paintings on the subreddit. Keep things fun and friendly.

When you’re done looking through these awesome (re)works of art and upvoting your favorite ones, we’d like to hear your thoughts in the comments at the bottom of this list.

What’s your relationship with painting and art in general, Pandas? What creative hobbies do you have? Have you ever tried updating a painting that you’ve found somewhere? Tell us all about it, we can’t wait to hear what you have to say. And as always, the credits for each artist are underneath each image.