9 Unique Acrylic Painting Ideas on Canvas

 Inspiration overloading! Unique Acrylic art ideas like never before.  Stunning Acrylic Artworks await you!

1.Butterflies!

Even if insects give you an ick, who doesn’t enjoy seeing these winged beauties in their gardens? Observing their vibrant wings as they flutter from one flower to another. And that leads us to our idea of painting them, to forever entrap the beauty of their wings onto the canvas so that we may relive that ethereal moment of witnessing them.

Now butterflies exist in about 20,000 different species and that means about 20,000 different wing designs. I would suggest you paint the design that fits your skill set, if you’re a beginner, stick with the simpler ones like the Blue Morpho butterfly and if you’re a more experienced artist you can try your hand with other species like the peacock butterfly.

There’s never a limit to the amount of butterfly paintings one can make. You can make it in different angles and styles. The butterfly can be in flight or it can be resting on a flower. The painting can be in realism, semi-realism, cartoon or even abstract. The background can be abstract or with a touch of realism. You can get as creative and personal with it as you like. Remember, there are no restrictions when it comes to art!

2. Keys

For all the vintage aesthetic lovers out there, who also happen to have an interest in art, isn’t this idea just for you? Even if you’re not a fan of old keys or fantasy keys, you must have someone in your circle who might like these, so why not give them a gift?

Keys come in various designs and some often originate from famous shows or movies, for example Locke and Key, which is an interesting watch. Even aside from just shows and cartoons, there are certain novels and games in which keys play an important part, therefore making them quite a cool object to paint.

Paintings are an expression of your emotions, so depending on how deeply you think about it, the key you paint can be either the key to your heart or the key to your soul or if you made it without much thought it could go off as just a key.  

What adds depth to a painting, is the emotion you paint it with. Emotions can turn the simplest things into the most complex. 

3. Cute Cartoonish Animal

Now this is a very specific idea, but it has just the same amount of freedom as the other ideas. Think of your favorite animals and search up their chibi drawing online. Chibi drawings are fairly easy to draw yourselves, so you’ll get the hang of it in no time.

You can give your animal a pastel or black background or any other color you prefer. You can also add certain objects around your animal to give them a personal touch. For example the painting on your right.

This painting is based on your aesthetic as it is your chosen animal that you paint and that’s what adds more depth to it. It’s a great idea to enhance your environment with a painting of your dream pet.

4. Seascapes

Seascapes are often a challenge for many artists as the sea is such an insanely magnificent part of nature, one that has many faces. Painting of seascapes can range from terrifying; with depiction of stormy waves and dark clouds, tranquil; depicting the calm waves greeting the land as the sky remains either a clear blue or cloudy, to enchanting; when the sun or the moon either meet or ascend from the horizons, their lights dancing in the waves to create such a bewitching scene. 

Several artists try their hands at seascapes but only a few finish a piece that gets the right emotions through. But even those artists didn’t succeed after a few tries, it took great effort to reach that level of experience, so painting seascapes is a practice for almost every artist which they master through repeated trials. 

Seascape paintings can be as simple as you want them to be, or as challenging. You can pick a reference picture of the sea from the internet or find an already painted piece and use that as your reference if you find realism too challenging. 

5. Cat in Bush

Now the heading gives it away but it doesn’t have to be a cat. It could be any animal that you think you’re capable of drawing and painting. This is quite a random idea but it's quite a common sight to see in the area I live so I decided to paint it. Once again it can be as complex as you want and vice versa.  

You can make the cat or any animal you’ve decided to go with have well-defined details or just make a silhouette with two glowing eyes coming from the gaps between the leaves in the bush. You can make the leaves as detailed as making fine strokes to show the detailing on each leaf or just simply apply one stroke per leaf. 

At the end of it, your paintings’ difficulty level lies in your chosen painting style. Whether it's realistic, semi-realistic or cartoonish says a lot about how difficult it will be.

6. Keyhole Gateway

The moment of truth is upon us, can the key you painted before be the one to another dimension? Behold! I present to you the idea of making a gate in the shape of a keyhole so that the next time your mind wanders, it has a proper destination.

The painting on your right is just an example. You can customize the inner world of your keyhole according to your desires. In this specific example, you can see a vast expanse of a river and rows of mountains on the sides with the silhouette of a land at the horizon. The setting of the scene is done at dusk which is evident by the transitioning colors of the sky. The keyhole entrance is at the place of darkness with the only light appearing through the world inside, illuminating the patches of grass and wildflowers at the foot of the entrance.

Such a magical scene can’t help but urge your mind to wander about whether such a place really exists! 

7. Forest Scene

Forests are quite an enchanting place to be at, unless your life’s genre is horror. But similar to seascapes, forests have faces too. The same forest which seems like a fairy’s inhabitant might also be one where a criminal buries the corpses of their victims. 

What kind of forest you intend on painting is solely up to you. If you don’t want it to be too detailed, simply painting a bunch of trees on the horizon and focusing on the sky might work for you. If you want to go into more depth, go ahead, paint it from the perspective of being inside the forest. Paint the sun beams scattering through the gaps in the tree leaves and reaching the grass in the forest.

 You can make your forest turn out exactly the way you intend for it to, by carefully selecting your palette, the time of day you’re painting the forest at and the style of painting you choose to work with.

8. Space Aesthetics

By space aesthetics, I mean to say the objects found in space. These can range from planets, moons, suns, stars to galaxies, blackholes, meteors and more. This idea is perfect for all the astrophiles and selenophiles out there, even if you’re not one, you can always give them to someone who loves space. 

Moving on, you can make several paintings of space. The moon is a perfect idea for painting a space object, especially for the less experienced artists. A spiral galaxy might just be right for more experienced artists to try their skills at. And creating spacescapes in which there’s planets and stars in the distance might just be a good enough challenge for the skilled artists out there.

9. Rose Twirling Around Dagger

The heading should be self-explanatory, but allow me to put it more poetically. A dagger wrapped in roses symbolizes the contradiction that exists in human life. The coexistence of contrasting forces and complex emotions. The dagger represents the darker side and the roses depict the lighter side. Love and pain; calm and chaos; beauty and danger. It signifies that although quite different from one another, the two co-exist. Such is the nature of humans, a coexistence of different and complex emotions all in the same heart and mind.

Such a painting urges you to think more philosophically, and definitely attracts any viewer's eyes to its vibrant colors and design. It's quite a unique idea to paint that I’m sure will pique your interest.

Summary 

To brief you on this article, I’ll start with mentioning that imagination has no limit and these ideas are just the first step and your final piece doesn't have to end up exactly like the beginning ideas. As long as this article inspires you to a certain extent, I’ll be content. The first idea of butterflies works great for artists whose interests lie in nature, it allows them to become more focused when in nature. The keys are a fun little idea to bring something unique to your painting collection. The animal paintings are a great way to pass time and be productive. The sea and forestscapes really allow you to observe all faces of nature in its prime. The keyhole gateway keeps you in touch with your inner child as it lets all your imaginations run loose. The space paintings are not only ethereal as finished pieces but also have an enjoyable process of creation. The last painting idea holds a lot of depth that can only be noticed if it is created with the same intensity of emotions. Overall, every single idea in this article is unique in its own way.

Thank you for reading till the end and I hope you will be inspired by this article!