Altered Art Aliens Among Us

 When I first started doing altered thrift store paintings, I wanted to make sure I wasn't just copying the artists already doing them. If you aren't familiar with altered thrift store art, it's basically taking a painting from a thrift or antique store, something very basic like a landscape or flower arrangement, and adding things that obviously don't belong. Dragons and other mythological creatures, space ships, characters from TV shows and movies. Pretty much anything is up for grabs, but I didn't want to just do more of what is already out there.

I found two things that tend to be my favored areas: tentacles, because they are so fun to paint and can be worked in in such creative ways. And a little green alien guy, because, well, come on. He's just cute! 

Here's the first alien one I did:

I found the original landscape and could just see a spaceship crash landed in the water. Of course I had to make it tell more of a story.

And that story-telling aspect is what led to more altered thrift paintings featuring this guy, this time with him landing on purpose:

This original was black and white, so I had to get really creative:

This past week, I added a couple more to the series:

I really just posted here today to have a place where all of the paintings in the series are in one place. 

You can buy prints of the first three -- and will soon find the originals and prints of the last two, as soon as the oil paint is dry enough for shipping -- on my Etsy shop JumpingRails. (The first three originals are sold.) You can also find prints of the tentacle paintings and other altered thrift paintings there as well.

For now, though, I just hope you've enjoyed peeking into the little green alien's world. Maybe someday I'll give him a name.