Creating interesting backgrounds is an important part of mixed media art, but buying art supplies can get expensive. Making everyday materials into cool looking mixed media art backgrounds is much more fun! In order to choose the best mixed media background materials, start by choosing a theme for your artwork. Are you going for rustic or modern? The following are some ideas of mixed media backgrounds to get you started.
You can get really cheap shelf liner from a dollar store, the quality is not important as you’ll be using it as background for your mixed media art anyway. You can use it as it is, or spray paint it to achieve interesting cool effects in colors to suit your theme.
Aluminum foil is incredibly versatile. You can color it with nail polish or alcohol markers, you can wrinkle and smooth it to add texture, you can even crumble it to create very textured 3D backgrounds. And most kitchens will have a roll or two of cheap aluminum foil you don’t want to use for cooking.
You can created amazing mixed media backgrounds with paper napkins. They are cheap, come in a huge variety of colors and patterns and you can either decoupage them or use them straight as part of your mixed media artwork.
Looking for an aged, rustic effect for your art? You can easily create a mixed media background using Crackle Painting. This is a very useful mixed media technique. First, paint a surface in your desired color. Then apply a coat of crackling medium (or white glue, of you don’t have crackling medium) once it’s dry. Then cover that coat with a paint that contrasts with your first layer, and you’ll have a rugged, colourful background ready to go.
Old newspapers, or even old books or songbooks you can buy at a garage sale make for beautiful mixed media backgrounds. You can process them further by staining them (use tea to give an aged feeling) or painting over them with watercolor paint. Watercolor paint fades the ink enough to make it abstract but it’s still possible to see that there is writing on that background, creating really beautiful effects for your mixed media backgrounds.
You can even buy ready made background books such as this one to use in your mixed media artwork.
If you remove the top layer of a cardboard piece you are left with the corrugated lines, which make for a rugged, highly textured background.
You can use modelling paste to create highly textured backgrounds to suit any and all themes. And you don’t even need to buy it, you can make your own modelling paste if you are feeling crafty. You can even use baby powder for a cheap modelling paste that can be used for mixed media artwork and backgrounds. It can be a bit messy though.
You can use reusable stencils to create shapes and complex patterns using this modelling paste, which you can paint afterwards.
You can upcycle old books and create amazing mixed media art on their pages. You will need to glue several pages together to create a thick enough background for your art, but the end result can be an awesome 3D mixed art sketchbook that uses some of the book pages with cool headings or illustrations.
Similar to napkins, you can use wrapping or gift paper glued together as background for your mixed media art. Waxed paper and metallic papers can be combined to create different textures within your artwork.
Highly textured cloth, such as burlap or rough cotton, can be used as background for mixed art and upcycled into rustic mixed media artwork. Denim and muslin also are thick enough to allow for paint but give a more modern effect. Take a look at your discarded clothes basket and see what you can make from it.
As you can see, in terms of mixed media backgrounds the sky is the limit. Almost any material can be used as long as it’s strong enough to work with. Techniques such as decoupage allow you to use the patterns and textures of softer materials to frame your art.
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