The 20 Best Painting Ideas and Templates to Repaint

This post may contain affiliate links. We may earn a small commission from purchases made through them, at no additional cost to you.

Do you like to be creative, are always looking for new inspirations, and constantly asking yourself “what should I paint next”? Then you’ve come to the right place! Below we reveal 20 of the best painting ideas. We have searched far and wide in the vast expanses of the internet to be able to find the following ideas for painting. The spectrum ranges from everyday themes, ideas for drawing, to innovative painting techniques. Have fun!

Painting Ideas – Our Selection of Designs and Themes

Not sure what to paint? Not to worry. We have selected some of the best painting ideas below. These include easy things to paint for beginners, as well as painting inspiration for more advanced artists.

Painting Landscapes

Landscapes are easy things to paint with all painting techniques and remain very popular. And not without reason, since well-painted landscapes convey a feeling of freedom, comfort, or inner peace. For the actual depiction, you will need a good spatial imagination and knowledge of perspective. This gives your paintings the necessary depth. If you would like to discover or deepen these secrets, it is worthwhile to study and repaint good works of other artists, or to paint overdrawing templates.

Mountain Landscapes

Do you like hiking and love the mountains? Then we have a beautiful mountain landscape for you to paint. The many shades are one of the important elements, which make this work come to life. This painting inspiration is not too difficult, but it offers a fantastic end result.

Painting the Sea

The longing which the sea triggers is simply indescribable. Capturing this magic is not for easy paintings. Therefore, it makes sense to look for beautiful sea images to paint yourself and use them as painting inspiration. For a medium, we can recommend watercolors, with which you can paint very beautiful pictures. Oil paints can also be used for this purpose. In our painting ideas template below, we chose to use oil paints.

Famous Artworks

It can never hurt to learn from masters of the trade. That is why well-known works are best suited to be used as ideas for repainting. You will find that there is often a secret behind these works, which you must first discover. You will definitely learn a lot by repainting pictures of famous artists. You can then integrate this knowledge into your style. When wondering “what should I paint?”, looking towards existing famous artworks is always a good idea.

Architecture Drawings and Buildings

Architecture is always a popular design for drawing and painting. The approach can range from technical, strictly geometrical drawings to comic-like, brightly colored paintings. We have decided on an image for painting ourselves, which has a rather puristic approach, but at second glance contains an incredible amount of details. Try to draw the essential lines first and in a second step add in all the shades. After that, you can perfectly use watercolors for colorful accents. A challenge, but you can grow with it, can’t you?

Everyday or Cherished Objects

Look around your home: You will certainly find many everyday objects that you can put on paper or canvas, each with its own effect and difficulty. You can choose the level of difficulty quite easily, and thus develop yourself step by step. Painting inspiration can be found all around you.

Painting Fruit

Painting ideas of fruit? Yeah, sure, why not! The advantage is that you usually have fruit or vegetables right at hand. It’s not so easy to trace this. And if you think that paintings of fruit are quite boring, we would like to show you one of the many beautiful works to repaint. As you can see, a simple orange can be turned into a work of art, which fits perfectly into the kitchen for hanging up. Fruit are good things to paint for beginners.

Flowers

Flowers as designs always make something special. Nature has countless inspirations up its sleeve, which can be traced or repainted with all kinds of painting techniques. In our example, we have chosen a watercolor painting, which can offer beautiful gradients and many details. There are many other drawing templates of flowers out there – ranging from easy paintings to advanced designs.

Plant Themes

Plant images for repainting is a good exercise for beginners. The difficulty here lies especially in the correct dimensions and relationships to each other. Besides the simple drawing of plants or parts of plants, they can also be copied and used very creatively, as our example picture shows. If wondering what to paint, you cant go wrong with leaves and plants.

Trace Beautiful Animal Pictures

Animal designs are plentiful and always popular. To breathe real life into the chosen design is a challenge. Here the difficulty ranges from proportions, anatomy, posture, and faces to fur or feathers. So much the better if you use drawing templates to study and trace the animal you have chosen as a model. As far as the painting media is concerned, you are completely free. In our painting, we used watercolors and colored pencils.

Figural Designs

Figurative motifs have a high level of difficulty. That means anatomical drawings like body parts, whole bodies, and so on. We have chosen a somewhat simpler body part, namely the eye. It is relatively easy to draw but to achieve the required expression you have to make a big effort.

Faces/Portraits

Faces and portraits are also very popular for painting. Getting the facial expressions right is one of the biggest challenges here. With a painting template, portrait painting is much easier. Here too, you are free to choose the painting materials and can use anything you have at hand, from pencil to oil paint.

Nude Painting

Nude drawing is one of the royal disciplines in figurative drawing, where the main focus is on proportions and anatomy. Natural shades are also very important here, to give the design life. Posture, line of sight, and spatial design are also components of nude painting.

So, a challenge for you! For nude painting, you can fall back on a large amount of painting media, which reaches from pencil, ink, pastel crayons up to felt-tip pen and watercolors. If you don’t have a model at hand, which is available to you for a few hours, you can simply use existing nude paintings to repaint.

Fashion Sketches

The area of fashion offers you countless designs and inspirations. The range varies from very simple fashion sketches to artistic, highly detailed pictures. Fashion designers first draw a rough sketch of their ideas, which are then used to create elaborate fashion illustrations as required. We have selected such a fashion illustration for you as one of the painting ideas.

Simple Images to Repaint – Stick Figures

Does this seem a little simplistic? Sure, that’s true, but you have to start somewhere, right? If stick figures are too trivial for you, you can also draw simple comic subjects, which will make it easier for you to start drawing comics. Try telling little stories with your simple drawing characters. That way you learn to draw the same character in a different pose. Stick figures and cartoon characters look particularly good in a picture frame. These make excellent easy paintings for anyone starting out.

Tracing Cartoon Images

Cartoons are always a nice challenge, especially for cartoonists. From single characters to coherent comics with a story, you can draw everything here. Surely you still have one or other comic at home, which can serve as a good drawing template. We have chosen this fun vegetable as a template for painting.

Manga Images to Trace

Mangas are Japanese comics and have their own unique style that you will recognize immediately. If you have already had some experience with comics, you should definitely learn to draw mangas and try to attempt some of these pictures. This opens up a new perspective on your art style and can be very inspiring.

Acrylic Paintings Ideas – Spatula Technique

The acrylic technique is incredibly popular. That’s why you can find a huge amount of ideas for acrylic paintings on the internet. We have selected the spatula technique from the large pool. Here you apply viscous acrylic paint with a spatula on a painting surface, for example, a canvas. With this technique, you create unique structures.

Mixed Media

Mixed media is fascinating. Here, there are no rules on what to do or not to do, only your creativity matters. For example, you can embellish your pencil drawings with all kinds of painting media and put the finishing touches on them.

Often the basis is a pencil drawing, which is embellished with acrylic paint or ink. Also, objects like cutouts from newspapers or magazines, photos, fabrics, or other decorations can be included. We have written an article on the topic of mixed media, which we recommend you to read. Below we have chosen an artwork from the mixed media field as a painting inspiration.

Fluid Painting

Fluid painting a fun and unique way to create art. This art style includes a couple of different techniques which we will explain below.

Acrylic Pouring

We have already shown acrylic painting ideas above. There is another, new technique which we would like to highlight. The acrylic pouring, also called acrylic casting or acrylic flow technique comes from the USA. Here you mix acrylic paint with a pouring medium, which makes the paint flow better.

Then you pour this mixture on a canvas and create spectacular abstract works of art in no time. You can also add silicone oil to the pouring mixture to create the cells that are so typical of this technique. This technique produces easy paintings for beginners and children to enjoy too.

Resin Art

The next step in the field of fluid painting is resin art. Here the main material is resin, also called epoxy resin or epoxy. It is a two-component material, which you mix together. This is followed by a chemical reaction which makes the mixture harden in a plastic-like manner within a few hours.

You mix paint or glitter into the still liquid epoxy resin and pour the mixture onto the canvas. With a blowtorch or hot air dryer, you let the colors flow into each other and create exciting effects. Besides the resin paintings, you can also pour out molds in which you can also permanently cast and preserve objects. You can also create unusual shapes. This is definitely a fluid painting technique, which you should try out once!

Alcohol Ink

Alcohol ink art for repainting is a great idea for beginners. The basis for this is a waterproof base like Yupo paper, on which you dribble isopropyl alcohol. Then you can start painting. Take alcohol inks, which are paints based on alcohol, and dribble them in small quantities on the paper. Fascinating, moving patterns are created. Because of the alcohol, the paintings dry very fast and can be reworked with alcohol at any time.

Painting Animals

Animals are ideal themes for painting. Due to the degree of difficulty, this is rather suitable for advanced artists. Animal painting ideas offer endless possibilities and challenges. From the eyes, proportions to hair, there are many areas to learn. There are many painting techniques you can use when painting animals.

We hope that you have been able to draw a lot of inspiration with our compilation of pictures for tracing and repainting.  Do you have more ideas for painting? Then get creative and try them out! Paintings ideas can be found everywhere, with painting inspiration visible wherever you look. We hope that you enjoy the process!