When I think of mixed media, I think of the early cubist such as Georges Braque. However mixed media goes back almost as long as artists have.

What are mixed media? Simply-mixed media is the use of more than one basic material in a given work of art. You can combine objects that work together limited by only your imagination-paint, paper, cloth, sand, wire, limbs, leaves, insects, and anything else you can think works.

It can be complicated and imaginative or something as simple as using graphite pencil to draw the outline for a watercolor wash painting (two mediums when wash is done) and touched up with opaque gouche (three mediums in your mixed medium painting at this point) such as R. D.Burton’s “Knobby Tree”.

On his “Fruit Dish and Glass” (above), Georges Braque presented the first paper colle’ mixed media painting. He felt that because the paper looked realistic and yet it was flat and could act as the foreground, the background, or both. Braque played with textures, shapes, and composition to construct a painting that is half recognizable and half symbolic.

Perhaps the most popular mixed media is the one called collage (such as Georges Braque’s “Fruit Dish and Glass”). A collage is made by gluing different materials to a background. The word collage is taken from the French word coller-“to glue.

But there are all types of mixed media besides the popular and fun collages. Whether they want to or not, many oil painted pictures are mixed media. Many are done by under painting the entire painting in acrylic and painting over it with oil paint. This can be done without violating the “fat-over-lean” rule because acrylics dry solid. However these do make the painting a “mixed media” painting.

When painting “Adam and Eve”, Lynn Burton used this technique. He said it helps work out the entire painting before beginning to paint with oil paint.

There are so many exciting things to talk about when discussing mixed media, so there will be further blogs discussing this. We will guide you through some of the basic principles of drawing, painting, collaging and printing, using a common range of materials.

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