Mixing Media

Are you stuck in a rut? No inspiration when you pick up the same old coloured pencils and stare at the blank piece of plain white paper in front of you? Well I have a fantastic solution to your art block woes. Mixing media!

And no, I'm not talking about mixed media, and have made a typo. Mixing media is making a temporary change to another art material. I started love affair with art by drawing pictures with coloured pencil. I got pretty good at it to. However it limited what I could create.

The media you use will naturally affect your art style. When I draw in coloured pencil I focus more on details and tend to dislike creating backgrounds because it is time consuming to create large blocks of colour.

The main reason I was restricted to pencil was because it was comfortable. I had never really tried anything else. My only experiences with any other media was painting in art class at school. And I was never very good at that. Everything else was outside my comfort zone.

I would pick up a paint brush and almost be to afraid to place it on the canvas or paper. The fear of stuffing up and wasting the paint or the paper was to acute to overcome. I felt that because my earlier attempts at painting were not as good as some of my coloured pencil drawings, I couldn't ever create any thing good with paint. However I just had to get over it and try. Intellectually I knew that I would only ever improve if I practised.

There was a photo of a horse on my wall(The same you see at the top of the page.). I found it so beautiful I had to draw it. However the beauty was in the colours and not in the shape. If I was to get this out of my system I was going to have to paint it, as paint gives much more intense colours than pencil.

As soon as I started I realised that the effects of the art book had improved more than just my pencil abilities. With this small success under my belt I suddenly found it much easier to experiment with different media's. Soon I tried pastel. And have never looked back. My first few were horrid, but with practice I managed to create the kelpie dog you see here.





Trying a new way of creating art can help spark your enthusiasm for drawing or sculpting all over again. It's like discovering pens when you were a young child and being endlessly fascinated by the colour coming out of the end of the piece of plastic griped in you chubby fingers.

Your drawing skills improve exponentially because of the different styles you need to try to get the new media to work for you and art block mysteriously vanishes. Art no longer is some thing you can do... It becomes some thing you can create.