Mixed media art can be defined as "visual artwork in which more than one medium or material had been employed. Assemblages and collages are two common examples of art using different mediums using wet and dry materials such as cloth, paper, paint and wood. The larger umbrella of artforms this modern art form comes out of is called Contemporary Art.
A History
One might think that mixed media art would strictly be a modern art style or form. I certainly used to think that when I first stumbled upon it via tutorials on the internet, but, this artform does have a history that goes back even before the twentieth century.
Little did I know that Pablo Picasso among others was considered a mixed media artist. In the early teens and twenties, that of his cubist collages, he created three specific pieces which fell into this area. Just as contemporary art is a larger umbrella where you can find the art mixed media categorized, mixed media art itself is actually a larger umbrella term to cover a handful of styles. With "Still Life with Chair Caning" in 1912 he pasted paper and oil cloth to canvas combining them with painted areas. In 1914 he created another piece, an assemblage called the "Glass of Absynthe" - a vertical piece of many disparate objects brought together. Another artwork in 1923 was "The Lovers" which he made using ink, watercolor paints and charcoal on paper.
From before the twentieth century we have the Byzantine empire through the Renaissance that while not referred to as mixed media artists (330-1453 AD) often used gilded gold leaf on their paintings, mosaics, frescoes and manuscripts.
Tempura, an ancient Egyptian medium, and oil paintings were popular. Vibrant skies and luminous halos on religious panels was captured through the application of gilded gold leaf.
Today you can find videos on YouTube and you can learn and be inspired by tutorials of mixed media art from paper to canvas. One technique of mixed media is layering. A french word "echafouder (pronounced as-da-foo-dey) meaning "to build up." While I have a few pieces which are basically one medium, especially with encaustic artworks, almost all my work I call mixed media because I have carried the basic ideas of scrapbooking into pieces of artwork on the canvas which traditionally would have been used solely in pages.
Basically when it comes to defining mixed media art, the sky is only as limited as the artist's imagination. Below are a few images of my scrapbooking pages and my artwork on canvas.
So what do you have in your arts and crafts stash you could use to make your next masterpiece? Type in mixed media art or even scrapbooking mixed media and be inspired.
Here I have Mirror Mirror, WhoRU?, Friends, and God Bless the Child from an earlier blog using scrapbook pages.
And here I have Bethullah (Virgo), A Nation's Hope, Altogether Beautiful and Golgotha. Prints of my original artwork.