Giving an Old Painting New Life: Reworking "Oh Deere!"

Hi, I'm Valerie Englehart, and today I want to take you through something I do every so often: digging up an old painting and giving it a rework. As you grow as an artist, you become more confident and you learn new techniques, and sometimes there are paintings sitting forgotten in your portfolio that just need a little extra love.

The Painting: A Kraken in a Sunflower Field

The piece in question is called Oh Deere! (yes, it's a pun), which I painted maybe three or four years ago. I love the concept: a kraken emerging from a sunflower field, wrangling a tractor instead of a ship. I like to let the meaning stay open, whether you read it as environmental commentary or just me being silly with tentacles. That's part of the fun of art — I'll let you decide what it means to you.

The painting was technically "done," but it had been sitting in my portfolio, unhung, waiting. So I pulled it back out.

What Wasn't Working

My original idea was to keep the tentacles light and atmospheric, almost disappearing — something incomprehensible, like the sanity-check mechanic in games such as Eldritch Horror or Arkham Horror. Are you really seeing what you're seeing?

The concept was cool. The execution wasn't quite there yet. And that's okay — if you have a cool idea, go for it even if you're not fully confident in your abilities yet, because you can always come back and rework it later, or repaint it from scratch entirely.

Getting Back Into the Colors

I remembered most of the original colors. For the tentacles, my main color was Daniel Smith's Moonglow, so I squeezed out a fresh batch and got to work darkening them. I also had some leftover paints out from a foxglove tutorial I'd done for my membership, the Fearless Painter Collective — Daniel Smith's Rose of Ultramarine and Quinacridone Magenta. Since watercolor reconstitutes, I was able to fold those in for extra vibrancy and visual interest, even though they weren't part of the original painting.

For the suction cups on the tentacles, I painted negatively, working with a size 3 synthetic round brush and my trusty silver Black Velvet size 8 round for bleeding color away. I'd add a line of neat pigment or a darker value into the center and then bleed it out to build shadow.

One small note on brand names: I mention them a lot because pigment names don't always match across brands. Winsor & Newton's Payne's Gray, for example, is much bluer than Daniel Smith's Payne's Gray. If I just say "Payne's Gray," you might not land on the color I actually used — the brand matters.

Leaving the Tractor Alone

I was already very happy with my tractor, so I didn't touch it, and the background stayed as-is too. Most of my attention went to the tentacles and the sunflowers.

Fixing the Sunflowers

For the sunflowers, I reached for Daniel Smith Piemontite Genuine — a granulating brown with red undertones. I'm not sure it was my original color, but I know it plays well with everything else on my paper.

The real problem with the sunflowers was that there was basically no definition. The idea had been to make the painting feel maddening, hard to parse. In theory, cool idea. In practice, it just looked unfinished and unconfident.

Here's a lesson I keep relearning: beginner painters tend to keep everything in a light-to-medium value range because they're afraid to go too dark. But rich, deep values make your lights pop by comparison, and that contrast is what creates a visually striking painting. I'd also left in way too many loose, lost edges. I love a lost-and-found edge, but if everything is lost, it just reads as a mess. Even abstract work needs some flow, and a mix of hard and soft edges.

So I went back into the sunflower centers more confidently, bleeding that color into the petals to create shadow and separation. Shadows pick up reflections of the color around them, which is why these came out on the brown side, echoing the brown sunflower centers.

I also brought in Daniel Smith Cascade Green for deep, dark values, negatively painting little triangles around the petals. Since the original edges were so loose and undefined, I basically had to invent them — pick a spot, make it make sense, and commit.

I gave the leftmost sunflower, my "main" one, the most depth and attention to establish a hierarchy, while still giving the others enough attention that the painting didn't look lopsided or unfinished.

Following the Flow

The painting has a diagonal flow from upper right to lower left, with a complementary color scheme — pink up top, green down below. Originally I hadn't put any green in the lower right, which in hindsight didn't quite work. So as I reworked the piece, I added more green there, and I think it was the right call.

For the petals, I tried cadmium yellow hue since that's what I remembered using originally, but it wasn't working for me this time. I switched to quinacridone gold, my favorite yellow. It plays well with everything, and even though yellows only get so dark, quinacridone gold still gave me a real value shift — enough to strengthen the petals, deepen the foreground, and clarify that the sunflowers sit closer to us than the kraken's tentacles.

I was careful not to over-define every petal, though, because I still wanted the piece to feel loose and atmospheric. I love mixing positive and negative edges — on the lower-right sunflower, for instance, the upper petals are painted positively while the lower petals are negative, which makes those lower petals feel like they're catching more light.

Bringing the Tentacles Forward

For the suction cups, I used gouache and then blended it away for a soft transition, giving more white to the tentacles closest to the foreground and less to the ones further back. That's what pulls focus toward the tentacles that matter most — because let's be honest, "tentacles in a sunflower field" is the whole point. I want them noticed.

There's something freeing in that: no one is stopping me from being a surrealist, and painting flowers is something I genuinely have an affinity for. So even when I step outside my comfort zone, I try to bring a little of what I love along with me. Pushing yourself doesn't mean abandoning your instincts entirely.

With repetitive elements like all those suction cups, it really is "second verse, same as the first" — the same technique over and over, just staying mindful of what's closest in space, what deserves attention, how shapes overlap, and how much gouache-to-water ratio each one needs.

Knowing What to Leave Alone

One tentacle in the back, I left almost entirely untouched. I love how it fades away, with the pink underlayer showing through. A rework doesn't mean everything has to change — there were genuinely good bones in this painting, and part of the job was recognizing what to leave alone.

The Result

I'm really happy with where this painting landed. I think it's improved enough that I'd frame and hang it. And funny enough, even though we're heading into summer, galleries are already starting to look for Halloween art — so this piece might be a good one to pitch for that.