6 Artists Who Make You Fall in Love with Mixed Media

Some stories are too big for just one medium to tell. That’s where mixed media artists come in. They use paint, photos, paper, thread, and so much more to create art that feels full of life and emotion. Every piece they make has layers of colour, feeling, and meaning. Mixed media isn’t only about mixing materials it’s about mixing memories, ideas, and experiences. It’s the kind of art that makes you want to look closer, to see what’s behind each layer. At the Arts to Hearts Project, we celebrate artists who think differently, who use different tools to show how connected art and emotion can be.

In their hands, simple things become something special. A paper scrap can hold a memory. A brushstroke can feel like a whisper. A line of thread can remind us of time passing. Each part adds to the next, creating something that feels whole and real. Every piece carries emotion. These artists show that creating art isn’t always about starting fresh, sometimes it’s about seeing what’s already there in a new way. Through layers and small details, they turn everyday things into something meaningful and beautiful.

Mixed media art is about growing and exploring. It reminds us to slow down, to notice the small things, and to find beauty in what’s different or imperfect. This week, we celebrate artists who use all kinds of materials to tell their stories  who paint, build, and imagine in their own way. Their work reminds us that art, like life, is made of many layers, and every layer has something worth seeing.

Mark Wills @markwillsartwork

Based in Somerset, Mark Wills is a mixed media artist who loves to explore the space between order and chaos. His creative process is full of discovery, using gel plate Mono printing to build layers of colour, texture, and emotion. For Mark, each piece is just the starting point. He adds layers of paint, collage, and markings, allowing his work to move naturally between portraiture, surrealism, and abstraction. This mix of texture, layers, and unexpected details gives his art its strong, expressive energy. To Mark, mixed media is more than a technique, it’s a way of thinking. Every piece becomes a space for discovery. He adds brushstrokes, scrapes through layers, and combines images in ways that feel fresh and unpredictable. This approach allows his work to speak in many tones, sometimes fun and playful, sometimes emotional or dreamlike.

His one portrait might feel full of life and emotion, while another might blend animal and human forms, exploring identity, instinct, and imagination. What makes Mark’s work stand out is his openness to the creative process itself. He describes himself as an artist who loves exploring “the messy mix of identity, emotion, and how we show ourselves to the world.” You can feel that in every piece. His art is full of energy colors that contrast and blend, textures that seem alive, and figures that move between the real and the surreal. Each work invites the viewer not just to see, but to connect and feel. Through his mixed media practice, Mark Wills expands what printmaking can be. His art reminds us that creativity and identity are both layered, imperfect, and beautifully human.

Álvaro Gómez-Pantoja @alvaropanto_art

There are artists who paint what they see, and then there are artists like Álvaro Gómez-Pantoja who paint what they feel. Based in Valencia, Panto is a mixed media artist whose work lives between reality and emotion. Through drawing, painting, and expressive mark-making, he explores identity, vulnerability, and the complex layers of being human. His art isn’t about perfection; it’s about honesty and feeling. Each of his pieces begins with a sketch and evolves through layers of acrylic, watercolour, pencil, and ink. Panto lets each medium guide the next  colours blend, lines cross, and textures emerge naturally. The process feels spontaneous yet deeply intentional. The final image isn’t just a face or a figure; it’s an emotion unfolding on canvas, alive with movement and meaning.

His style carries both strength and tenderness. Faces stretch or blur, colours clash and calm, and emotions rise quietly through each layer. In exhibitions like Immortals, Panto focuses on raw expression exploring doubt, longing, and self-awareness. Every piece feels like a moment of truth, caught between chaos and calm. What draws people to Panto’s art is how real it feels. The distortions and textures don’t distance you; they pull you in. His use of colour breathes emotion, while his layered surfaces hint at the stories hidden beneath. Through mixed media, Panto shows that no single material can hold the full range of human experience. By merging mediums, he creates something deeper art that feels alive, imperfect, and profoundly human.

Adeline Shatsala @adelshat_ideas

For Adeline Shatsala, art started as a personal way to express what words couldn’t. It began with small sketches, journal notes, and quiet marks on paper, a private language of emotion and thought. Over time, that language evolved into her full creative practice, where calligraphy, abstraction, and painting come together. Today, Adeline is known as a mixed media artist whose work feels both personal and expansive like pages of a journal that have come to life. Based in Malaysia and completely self-taught, Adeline explores art through many forms. She combines painting, line work, and expressive marks to build rich, layered surfaces filled with texture and depth. Her colour palette often leans toward warm, earthy tones and soft, flowing shades. Each piece balances calm and movement structure and freedom creating a sense of both order and emotion.

Her inspiration comes from everyday life, nature, feelings, and memories. You can often see hints of plants, landscapes, and fleeting moods in her abstract works. Her art journals, filled with words, shapes, and textures, are spaces where she experiments and lets her thoughts flow freely. Each piece she creates carries a quiet energy, a reflection of how emotions can take form through art. What makes Adeline’s work special is how she turns simple materials into meaningful stories. A line becomes a feeling, a colour becomes a memory, and a texture becomes a moment of reflection. She brings together many elements drawing, writing, painting and makes them speak in harmony. 

Nimisha Doongarwal @nimishart

What happens when memory takes form? For Nimisha Doongarwal, it becomes art. Known as Nimishart, the Berkeley-based mixed media artist brings together painting, craft, textiles, and archival imagery to explore identity, memory, and the lasting traces of migration creating works that feel both intimate and timeless. Nimisha’s creative process often begins with research looking into family history, cultural roots, and the shared experiences of migration. From digital sketches to hand-cut paper, from archival photos to heirloom fabrics like her mother’s or grandmother’s saris, she combines many elements to build her compositions. The fabrics she uses aren’t just decorative; they carry memory and meaning, symbolizing the lives and stories of generations before her.

Her artworks often feature portraits and figures that exist somewhere between reality and memory. Bright colours, layered textures, and visible seams give her work a raw and tactile presence. Instead of hiding the overlaps and edges, she lets them celebrate the complexity of identity and the beauty of imperfection. What makes Nimisha’s work so powerful is how she transforms everyday materials into storytellers. A fold of cloth, a faded photograph, or a layer of paint becomes a record of migration, belonging, and transformation. Through her mixed media art, she reminds us that identity isn’t one thing; it’s a blend of histories, places, and emotions, all stitched together with care and meaning.

Vikki Reed @chakramandalas

For Vikki Reed, art is a way to interconnect frequencies of colour, energy, and emotion. Based in Arizona, she is a mixed media artist and teacher whose work glows with layers of feeling and movement. Her paintings carry a quiet rhythm of healing and balance, created through a blend of acrylic, collage, oil pastels, charcoal, and inks. Vikki’s creative journey has been one of continual growth and discovery. She began painting with watercolours in 1989, exploring desert landscapes and botanicals, later creating a series of mandalas that reflected her deepening interest in symmetry and spirit. In 2016, she transitioned to acrylics and a more contemporary mixed media style, embracing new levels of freedom and experimentation. 

With the addition of Gelli Plate Printing and collage in 2020, her process expanded into a rich dialogue between colour, form, and intuition. She describes her creative process as “intuiting what wants to be seen” allowing colours and shapes to find their own harmony in a kind of call-and-response with the painted surface. Colour lies at the heart of her work, used not only for its visual beauty but for its capacity to evoke emotion, restore balance, and nourish the spirit. What makes Vikki’s art distinctive is her honest and transparent process. She doesn’t hide the layers or transitions they are integral to the story. Each mark, line, and fusion of colour reflects movement, emotion, and growth. Her paintings invite moments of stillness, asking viewers to feel as much as they see. Through her layered mixed media works, Vikki Reed transforms colour and texture into pathways for healing and connection reminding us that transformation unfolds in layers, through patience, intention, and light.

Rob Hill @robhill.art

In Rob Hill’s world, denim, leather, and marble aren’t materials; they’re voices in dialogue. A painter, designer, and mixed media artist based between Denver and Los Angeles, Rob builds his work across canvas, denim, leather, wood, glass, and marble. Each surface carries its own weight and texture, and rather than concealing those differences, he invites them to speak. His practice is rooted in the belief that unity comes not from sameness, but from the meeting of contrasts, a philosophy he calls “Unity Through Diversity.” Geometry forms the skeleton of Rob’s work precise triangles, grids, and angular patterns but the pulse lies in his materials. Acrylic and oil often share space with textiles, ink, and collage. A single piece might merge clean lines with the grain of wood or the softness of fabric, creating a conversation between control and spontaneity. His Harmonization series, for instance, fuses acrylic, oil, fabric, and ink into layered abstractions where texture and colour generate rhythm as much as form.

What sets Rob apart is his awareness that every medium holds its own memory. A triangle painted on denim carries a different energy than one painted on marble; leather absorbs colour differently than canvas; ink seeps where acrylic might seal. He lets these shifts guide him, allowing materiality to shape both surface and meaning. In doing so, he transforms mixed media from a method into a mindset one where difference itself becomes beauty. Rob Hill’s work reminds us that abstraction can be deeply physical, tactile, and rooted in lived experience. Each layer, each material, each seam becomes part of the story. His art is both deliberate and unpredictable, crafted yet spontaneous, always reaching for harmony through contrast.

Art has never been about staying within the lines. It’s about layering, experimenting, and daring to let one medium speak to another. In the hands of these mixed media artists, paint collides with fabric, printmaking meets collage, surfaces shift from canvas to wood to glass. What emerges is not just visual beauty, but a reminder that creativity itself is layered built from pieces, textures, and voices that might seem disparate until they are brought together. What is most powerful about their work is how personal it feels. Each artist leaves traces of their process scratches, seams, overlaps, textures that refuse to be hidden. These works are alive with evidence of making, carrying within them stories of memory, identity, emotion, and place. They invite us to pause, to look closer, to notice that beauty often lies in the very act of layering. At the Arts to Hearts Project, we celebrate those who expand what art can be. These artists remind us that life itself is mixed media: moments of clarity and chaos, of softness and strength, of past and present overlapping. Their art gives form to that truth proving that harmony can be found in difference, and that meaning often lives between the layers.

So, the next time you stand before a piece of art, or even before a blank page of your own, remember this: creativity doesn’t have to be clean or singular. Like these artists show us, it can be complex, messy, and wonderfully layered. Because art, like life, is rarely just one thing, its many things, all at once.