A long time ago, in high school, I didn’t really appreciate mixed media art. As many others, I too thought it was a lesser art practice, just something to create for a larger piece of art, or something left in your sketchbook. As artist’s, not to generalise, I think we are taught that each medium has a specific use, we can only use that one with itself; eg charcoal drawing on paper, or watercolour on paper, or acrylic on canvas. Non of these mediums are to be mixed.
Well that has all changed. It changed in the middle of 2013, it wasn’t the best year, when I found art journaling. How I found art journaling can be left for another post in the future. But it has so very much to do with art journaling, as it is how I ‘re-discovered’ mixed-media, and of course art play. Mixed media and art play go together hand in hand. As picking up a medium and asking yourself what it can be mixed with is inquisitive, and then of course mixing and interacting two or more mediums is play. It is the simplest way of creating art, stemmed from early childhood. Just like children play to learn, we can discover many ways to play with our own art supplies.
And this is one of the reasons I fell in love with mixed-media. It is playful, and also very freeing creatively, but also emotionally. I love playing around with different mediums to achieve amazing results. But I think what I love most too, is the emotional freedom that comes from playing and creating mixed-media works. There are no rules, you can do anything you want. The whole creative world is at your finger tips.
How do you feel about mixed-media?
* I created this girl in my handmade art journal using black marker pen, white paint pen, and some water-soluble wax crayons, on a brown paper bag.
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