how do you safely strip old paintings to repaint them?”
…to paint a new painting on top of an existing painting. Artists have done just that for as long as there have been artists. You don’t need to strip the paint off the canvas in order to reuse it. The best and artistically traditional thing to do is to coat the surface of the paintings with a nice, even coat or two of gesso. Gesso is the white “paint” that artists coat the canvas with before painting a picture on it. You can buy gesso in most art supply stores. Gesso evens out the surface, tightens the fabric up, and provides a base on which the paint rests, in case at some future time a conservator needs to move the painting to a new piece of canvas. However, you can also simply pick a background color that you like and paint the canvas with a nice coat of that color of paint. Next do your sketch, and then start painting. The important thing, though, is not to mix paints. A canvas previously printed with oil paint should only be painted with more oil paint. By the same token, a canva
