Can you paint or draw on a rug? Is carpet a suitable surface for artwork?

You absolutely can;

I know that rug or carpet is an unusual surface to work with paint or drawing yet it is not that hard if you use the right materials, paint and dye. The nature of the rug-carpet surface with wool fibers tends to absorb paint and dye; because of that you should be ready to spend minimum 10 times more paint-dye for your project. You can start experimenting with acrylic paint with a small piece of rug-carpet piece and continue with the results. Just take your time and try to understand how fibers act with different consistencies of paint-dye and add more if needed. Acrylic paint is pretty resistant on wool after it dries and a good brand of acrylic paint will not come off from your rug-carpet after drying.

With oil, you should be using very little amounts or you'll have a hard surface at the end. The rug-carpets fibers will stick to each other and will create a serrated like surface. Ofcourse the colors look much vibrant and alive but you will loose the wool surface feature. You should also wait it to be totally dried and cured after moving it or rolling for shipping or storing if you use oil. If you bend, roll your rug-carpet before the paint fully cured, the paint will also bend and take a curvy shape on painted area, will crack after you unroll it again.

Fabric dye is also good for painting over rugs and carpets. Unlike acrylic, fabric dye gets lighter in color when it dries. Most of them are stabilized with applying heat and through that process you'll see it live. To keep your colors same as you've dyed-painted, you should be ready to do it again for better results.

You don't need to use an extra layer of protection over your paint-dye but if you want to use some, be sure you use a flexible stabilizer because wool fibers should move around to keep their main feature.

The rug-carpet surface is not a common surface for artwork and many artists working with them are using the material with more phisical purposes other than painting over it like making furniture covers, wall decors our of it because creating sharp, thin lines 8n a wool surface is very hard, yet not impossible with proper technique and dedication. Like all media used to create art and crafts, wool has its own kind of behavior and you must spend time to understand it's nature. As an organic, healthy material, I always advice people to use likewise paint-dye to create art and crafts with it.

If you're willing to work with cheap, digital printed rugs-carpets with velvet like surface, it's much more easy for you. It is already printed means you can also paint over it. If you make any mistake, you can buy another one with the exact design and size, even you can make your design on computer and let a manufacturer print that on a rug-carpet for you. It's pretty popular now to print car images and portraits on traditional looking rug-carpet designs and most of them not even using graphic softwares now; just telling their ideas to an Ai and downloading results, printing in minutes.

With that being said, I'm not against painting over digital print rugs-carpets because it's not different with painting on a blank canvas or painting on a print with a background you want. The main challenge about painting on rugs and carpets is you keeping the rugs-carpets original colors, motifs, borders or medallions and your art visible at the same time. To achieve that you should be mastering your scaling, drawing and shading skills and that's another topic of another post. Have a great day and keep art close...