23 Coolest Trippy Painting Ideas for 2024

Trippy painting ideas can add an eye-popping spark of psychedelic magic to your home art collection. What other style invites you to throw together the brightest colors and boldest shapes into the same vibrant images?

With trippy painting ideas, you can let your imagination run wild and bring to life whatever whimsical visuals you like. This sort of free-spirited creativity is crucial when figuring out how to find your art style, even if you're only at the beginning of your art adventure.

How do you make a painting look trippy? Depending on where your trippy painting ideas arise from, you can use abstract elements to twist forms or add a spectrum of experimental color combinations to shake up your canvas.

You can even include blacklight and glow-in-the-dark paint to add a mind-bending theatrical layer to your trippy painting ideas.

We've gathered our favorite trippy painting ideas to get you in the groove to try this exciting format for yourself. Get ready to take a spin through the unpredictable realm of trippy art!

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• Trippy Painting Ideas for Beginners
• Easiest Trippy Painting Ideas on Canvas
• Trippy Wall Painting Ideas

Trippy Painting Ideas for Beginners

1. Start With Art Classes

To give your trippy painting ideas a solid foundation, check into art classes near you and see what's happening in studios around town.

You'll find art classes in Chicago, art classes in Los Angeles, and art classes in NYC featuring introductory lessons in trippy acrylic painting ideas that will limber up your imagination.

2. Dip Into Paint and Sip

With a laundry list of paint and sip near you providing sessions for new painters, you'll have no trouble finding your place behind the psychedelic easel.

There's paint and sip in Orange County, paint and sip in Portland, and paint and sip in Atlanta that provide a laid-back painting party atmosphere where talented teachers provide painting tips for beginners while snacks and drinks are served!

3. Paint Over the Web

You can try online painting classes to get your trippy painting ideas flowing from your own creative space. These virtual lessons bring the instruction to you via the Internet for a home-based art experience that's sure to expand your awareness of color and form as you learn to paint in comfort.

4. Try Some Vivid Critters

Colorful animals make trippy painting ideas the whole family can enjoy! Choose from an array of sweet and simple creatures like elephants, tigers and even unicorns and give them a vivid rainbow treatment.

Using a basic black background with small white highlights will give your bright colors maximum pop factor.

5. Aim for the Stars

Starry night skies are a highly workable subject to help beginning painters Van Gogh with the flow of their trippy acrylic painting ideas.

Create a dynamic sense of motion by applying a full spectrum in small strokes that spin across the canvas. Dark details in the foreground will help set off the swirling sky.

6. Use Your Flower Power

As shared by Harvard Health Publishing, creative activities like painting offer healing properties, including stress relief. When you paint with a sense of looseness and fun, abstract flowers turn into trippy painting ideas that brighten up any gloomy corner.

7. Tap Into Tie-Dye

If you can smash paint onto a canvas, you can add tie-dye to your collection of simple trippy background painting ideas that are easy for beginners.

Create a colorful backdrop for a sweet smiley face that brings the '60s peace movement back into the spotlight in your home gallery. Even beginner painters can get in the groove with easy trippy art ideas like this one.

Easiest Trippy Painting Ideas on Canvas

8. Show Your Hand

A hamsa is a traditional symbol featuring a wide eye gazing from the center of an open palm. You can conjure your own in vivid blue and gold hues for trippy paintings on canvas with a deeper meaning.

The simple shapes and straightforward linework of the hamsa make this pattern a trippy painting idea that's easy to recreate.

9. Let It Glow

Trippy art ideas are easy to envision with a bit of glow-in-the-dark paint on your palette. Try using these phosphorescent colors to bring light and life to Northern Lights streaking across a forest in silhouette.

A touch of reflection in the water below lends a mirror effect for an even trippier final product. It's also one of the coolest pumpkin painting ideas for Halloween!

10. Pour It On

Pour painting methods make trippy painting ideas easy no matter your skill level. This tricky technique uses special additives to make the paint flow without losing its vibrancy.

The result is a marvelous marbleized masterpiece you can use as a stand-alone piece or add imaginative foreground elements for extra pizazz.

11. Become the Canvas

Body painting has to be one of the trippiest couple painting ideas ever! Use UV body paint to add multicolored flourishes to the arms, neck, back and torso of a willing partner.

Then, let them return the favor by giving you an acrylic-based temporary tattoo that gives off a spooky shine under a blacklight.

12. Get Spacey

Trippy alien paintings offer humorous trippy painting ideas, as well as one of the most iconic images around. Add mountains and forest for some brisk stroke work, and add simple shapes for planets and stars in the distance.

Make the star of the show the hovering UFO with a cow caught in its glowing tractor beam for a funny alien painting.

13. Dive Deep

With a duet of tropical fish in fiery colors on corresponding canvases, you have automatic trippy painting ideas for couples to share. Loose, playful strokes in an ocean of blues bring the sea up close.

The rest of the spectrum shows up in swooshes and swoops that cover these smooching swimmers from lips to fins!

14. Paint in the Rain

Mood-capturing impressionism provides trippy painting ideas that require very little technical skill. With thick square strokes of saturated color and a few linear details, you can capture the feeling of a rain-slicked street strewn with glowing streetlamps driving away the gloom.

15. Be Yourselfie

For instant trippy painting ideas made easy, create a self-portrait in the mad style of the surrealists! A quick and witty cubist-like drawing will help you capture the you that you see in your imagination.

Fill in the bold outline with bright colors and voila — you have a modern masterpiece that's like looking in a funhouse mirror!

Trippy Wall Painting Ideas

16. Be Jelly

Jellies are a trip all on their own, which makes adding them to your artistic lineup a no-brainer! A muted background mimics the sea, which brings all the translucent color of the tendrils into the spotlight. It's like painting your own lava lamp — what's a better trippy painting idea than that?

17. Set Sail

Try a black night background illuminated down the center with a celestial aurora. With a mirror image on the glassy surface of the water and a humble sailboat sliding along, you have a symbolic vision of a seafaring wanderer making their way through both the sea and the sky.

18. Get Tropical

The island life offers great inspiration for trippy painting ideas to brighten up the walls of your home. A setting sun painted like a rainbow casting its colors on clouds, sea and shore gives the impression of a concert poster from psychedelic rock in its heyday. Tune in and trip out!

19. Go Galactic

How do you make a galaxy painting? Use a cosmic color palette to turn your trippy painting ideas into intergalactic explorations.

Brilliant purples, vivid pinks and soothing blues blend beautifully into a shower of stars shrouding a peek-a-boo moon. With violet peaks and a shining sea in the foreground, it's hard to tell which planet you were on when you painted it!

20. Get Loud and Proud

Imagine the king of beasts rendered in a rainbow of luscious color adorning your wall. Including bold animal abstractions like a lion or tiger to your trippy wall painting ideas lets you add daring abstractions to familiar forms for next-level canvases sure to leave viewers in awe.

21. Shoot for the Moon

The combination of black, white and neon is a winning blend for trippy canvas painting ideas that are easy to execute, no matter how complex they appear.

By starting with a bold blending of colors across the canvas, you create a background to add highlights for the moon and clouds as well as the silhouetted trees and hills in the center.  

22. Up the Contrast 

The more black paint you add to the background of your canvas, the more electrifying your trippy colors will be! Start with a totally black background. Then add a strikingly colorful focus point with your favorite trippy shapes and subjects. Add some simple highlights to bring out the details.

23. Pucker Up

For the ultimate in trippy painting ideas, nothing beats a pair of glossy, rainbow-colored lips drizzling a vibrant spectrum onto a white background.

Add a silhouetted skyline smile and you have a psychedelic masterpiece that could be an album cover from one of the greatest rock bands of the '60s!

With trippy painting ideas in your artistic arsenal, you'll never be at a loss for fun and exciting projects to paint. Think of this experimental style as arts and crafts for adults with no limitations.

The emphasis this format places on imagination means the possibilities are literally endless. Whether you start with a trippy alien painting or a cosmic outdoor scene, don't be surprised if every finished painting inspires several new canvases to work on next.

For even more fun art ideas, check out other experiences happening on Classpop!