What Is Mixed Media and Why Does It Matter?
People see the words “mixed media” and assume it means a bit of everything. A collage. Something that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.
That is not what it means here.
Every canvas in Animarii: Unzipped begins the same way. Black. The whole surface, blocked out completely. Not a neutral ground, not a white canvas with ambition. Black, intentional, a void that has to be earned back from.
Then the sketch. The animal arrives in outline, just enough to know where it lives on the canvas. Then the zipper is placed and the abstract texture begins to build around and beneath it, the world below the seam taking shape before any colour exists anywhere. The piece has a skeleton and a landscape before it has a sky.
Only then can colour begin.
What comes next depends entirely on what the piece asks for. Some want collage. Some want foil pressed by hand into specific points of the surface. Some want spray paint moving across the texture in a way that couldn’t be planned. Acrylic inks that flow and find each other at the edges. I have an Aladdin’s cave of lightfast mediums and I pull from them intuitively, not from a formula. Every painting in this series has found its own material language because no two animals carry the same energy.
This is where the foil arrives in the pieces that call for it. Genuine metal, pressed by hand. The Rhino’s horn. The Elephant’s trunk. The Fox’s eyes. Not printed, not simulated. The foil marks the points of sacred significance in each piece, the places where power concentrates. It catches light differently at different times of day. In the morning it reads one way. In lamplight, another. That is not an accident.
Several pieces also contain genuine glass embedded into the surface. Not paint that imitates glass. Glass. In the Rhino it sits at the threshold below the zipper, black and heavy. In the Swan it catches purple light at the seam. Glass lives at the place in each painting where one world meets another, which is exactly where it belongs.
Once everything is blocked in, the piece comes alive through the push and pull of oil painting. Oil goes over all of it, final and unifying. It doesn’t flatten what’s beneath. It deepens it. It gives the surface a quality of light you cannot name but immediately recognise when you stand in front of it.
This is why the medium matters. No single material could carry what these paintings are trying to say. The black ground, the sketch, the texture, the zipper, whatever the piece asked for along the way, and then the oil pulling it all into one surface. Together, built in the right order, they create something that works differently on a wall than a conventional painting does.
And this is where mixed media becomes something else entirely. AI can generate images that look cosmic, that look painted, that look as though they carry depth and texture. What it cannot do is press metal into a surface with a human hand. It cannot embed glass at a threshold. It cannot build physical layers of material that catch and hold light in a room at 7pm on a Tuesday in a way that shifts slightly when you move. Texture is not a visual effect. It is a physical fact. It cannot be generated and it cannot be faked, and anyone who has stood in front of an original knows the difference immediately.
These paintings are also a permanent record. Every decision, every layer, every mark is locked into the surface in the order it was made. That is not recoverable or reproducible. There is one of each. The hand that made it is traceable in every square inch of the canvas. That matters, not as a marketing point, but as a fact about what the object actually is.
People often tell me they didn’t expect the originals to feel the way they do in person. I know. That’s the point.
The prints carry the composition, the colour, the mythology of each piece. What they cannot carry is the foil, the glass, the physical fact of the layers. When someone chooses an original, they are choosing the whole thing. The version that changes when the light changes. The one a photograph cannot fully hold.
That is what mixed media is, here. 🦋✨