Mixed Media Art

When people think of canvas painting, they imagine quiet studios, delicate sable brushes, and tiny palettes of oil paint.

But if you want to create massive, hyper-graphic, heavily textured modern pop-art in a fraction of the time, you need to abandon the paintbrush entirely and embrace the tools of the street artist: Spray Paint and Stencils.

Spray paint applies a flawless, ultra-smooth, perfectly opaque layer of highly saturated color in exactly three seconds. When combined with intricately cut stencils, you can slap massive, hyper-detailed typography or complex geometric patterns over a messy background with razor-sharp precision. Here is how to successfully drag graffiti techniques into fine art without destroying your living room.

You can buy the most expensive tube of "Metallic Gold" acrylic paint in the art store, but when you paint it onto a canvas, it will never truly look like metal. It will look exactly like what it is: brown plastic paint packed with tiny, sparkly glitter dust.

If you want your painting to possess a blinding, mirror-like, hyper-reflective luxury finish that catches the light from across the room, you cannot use paint. You must use the technique pioneered centuries ago in Byzantine religious icons: Gilding.

Applying microscopic sheets of Imitation Gold Leaf directly over heavily textured, brightly colored abstract paintings instantly elevates the artwork into the luxury tier. However, gold leaf is notoriously chaotic, sticky, and frustrating to handle. It will float away if you breathe on it. Here is the fool-proof guide to laying down the gold.

When working in an art journal or on a mixed-media canvas, you often want to incorporate a realistic photograph—like a vintage portrait of your grandmother or a high-contrast picture of a raven.

The amateur solution is to simply print the photo out and glue the thick piece of printer paper onto the page. The problem is that it looks exactly like what it is: a thick, stiff, white square of paper sitting awkwardly on top of beautiful, textured paint.

If you want the photograph to look like it was magically, seamlessly screen-printed directly into the texture of the canvas, you must master the Image Transfer. This technique chemically steals the ink off a piece of printed paper and permanently embeds it into acrylic medium, allowing you to physically wash the printer paper away down the sink. Here is the magical process.

Painting can be incredibly intimidating. If you are staring at a blank canvas trying to mathematically mix the perfect shade of skin-tone to paint a portrait, the pressure not to ruin it can paralyze you completely.

If you want to create highly complex, surreal, colorful art without the stress of perfect draftsmanship, you must pivot to Mixed Media Collage.

Collage is inherently liberating because you are not generating the raw materials from scratch; you are curating and destroying existing materials. By physically cutting up high-gloss fashion magazines, aggressively painting over them, and ripping up your own failed watercolor paintings to use as textured backgrounds, you build a piece of art like a puzzle. Here is how to successfully merge disparate materials into a cohesive masterpiece.

When you sit at a café in a bustling city and try to paint the complex architecture of the European street in front of you using only watercolor, the result is often a soft, blurry, undefined mess. Buildings require rigid structure, and watercolor naturally wants to bloom and bleed.

If you try to draw the exact same street using only a black ink pen, the drawing is incredibly structured and accurate, but it feels cold, sterile, and lifeless.

The undisputed king of the "Urban Sketching" movement is the marriage of both mediums: "Line and Wash." By laying down a chaotic, highly vibrant, loose watercolor foundation, and then carving sharp, rigid, architectural details over the top using waterproof black ink, you capture both the energetic color and the rigid structure of the city. Here is how to execute this rapid, highly satisfying technique.