Inside the Studio: How I Build a Mixed-Media Painting

People are always surprised by how quiet a studio is, and how boring most of the day looks. There is a version of the artist's studio in everyone's head involving dramatic gestures and paint on the floor. My studio has a lot of waiting in it.

So let me take you through an actual mixed-media painting from the beginning. This is close to the process behind the Dubai gold-leaf skyline, and it is the way I work whenever a piece needs physical surface rather than only image.

Stage one: preparing a surface that will hold texture

I almost never paint on a shop-primed canvas straight from the roll. Commercial priming is thin, even, and slightly repellent — designed for a paint film to sit on top of it. For mixed media I want the opposite: something with tooth that will hold material.

So the canvas gets two additional coats of gesso, applied in opposite directions, sanded lightly between them. Not sanded smooth — sanded to knock down the ridges and leave a surface that has some grain but no obstacles.

Then, if the piece is going to have real relief, I build it now. Modelling paste, sometimes with marble dust mixed in, applied with a palette knife and occasionally with a plastic card. This is the layer that will still be visible under everything else in three months. It has to be right, and it has to be dry — genuinely dry, which in a Dubai summer means longer than the tin promises.

I usually let this stand overnight and look at it in the morning light before doing anything else. Texture reads completely differently at eight in the morning than it does under studio lights at eleven at night.

Stage two: the underpainting nobody sees

The next thing is a full tonal underpainting, usually in a single earth colour — raw umber, burnt sienna, sometimes a grey-violet.

The purpose is not colour. It is to establish the entire value structure of the painting while I still have nothing to lose. Where is the darkest point. Where is the lightest. Where does the eye enter, and what does it do next.

This is the part of my academic training that I have never wanted to abandon. If the tonal structure is right, an almost arbitrary colour scheme will work. If the tonal structure is wrong, no amount of beautiful colour will save the painting, and I will spend three weeks discovering that.

I photograph the underpainting and look at the photograph in black and white on my phone. It sounds unserious. It is the most reliable diagnostic I have.

Stage three: acrylic, fast and wrong on purpose

Now the colour begins, and it begins in acrylic.

Acrylic is not my final medium in most pieces, but it is the right tool for this stage because it dries in minutes. I can put down four versions of a passage in an hour and reject three of them. That speed is the whole point. I am not looking for the right colour yet, I am looking for the range the painting wants to live in.

I work broadly here — large brushes, a wide palette knife, sometimes a cloth. Edges are deliberately careless. If I find myself being precise at this stage it means I have skipped ahead, and I stop.

This is also where I begin building translucency. Thin acrylic glazes over the textured ground catch in the relief and pool differently in the low areas, which begins to produce the depth that makes people put their hand out towards a painting. You cannot get that effect with opaque paint. It only comes from layers you can partly see through.

Stage four: the ugly stage

Every painting I have ever made has passed through a point where it is genuinely bad.

Not unfinished — bad. Muddy, incoherent, obviously the work of someone who has misjudged something. It usually happens right after the first colour layers go down, when there is enough information on the canvas to look like a painting but not enough to be one.

For a long time I thought this meant something was wrong. It does not. It is structural. The mind can only hold so much of the resolved image at once, and mid-process there is always more contradiction on the canvas than resolution.

What I have learned is simply not to make decisions during it. I turn the canvas to the wall and work on something else for a day or two. When I come back the diagnosis is usually obvious and usually small — a value that is too close to its neighbour, a shape that is competing with the subject.

This is the honest reason I do not send collectors weekly progress photographs during a commission. Nobody should have to see this stage of their own painting.

Stage five: metal leaf, if the painting asks for it

Gold leaf is not decoration and it is not for making a painting look expensive. It does something no pigment can do: it changes as you move.

Pigment reflects diffusely — it looks the same from every angle. Metal leaf reflects specularly, so a leafed passage is dark from one position and blazing from another. In a room where somebody walks past a painting several times a day, that turns the work into something that is never quite the same twice.

The application: a thin, even coat of size, left until it reaches tack — dry to the touch but with a faint pull, usually around twenty minutes, less in summer. Then the leaf, laid with a gilder's tip, pressed down with cotton wool, and the excess brushed away. It is fussy and unforgiving and the material is thinner than a hair and moves if you breathe.

I almost always distress it afterwards, breaking up the perfect surface with fine abrasive or letting a glaze sit into the joins between sheets. Untouched gold leaf reads as ornament. Broken gold leaf reads as light.

Both real gold and imitation leaf have their place. Imitation is brass and will tarnish over time if it is not sealed, which in this climate happens faster than people expect. If I use it, I seal it properly and I tell the collector.

Stage six: oil, and slowing down

The last layers, in most of my mixed-media work, are oil.

Oil is where the painting gets its final depth, because oil glazes are optically different from acrylic ones — richer, deeper, and able to sit transparently over a colour without dulling it. This is where the face resolves, where the darkest darks go in, where I finally allow myself precision.

Oil over acrylic is stable in this direction. The reverse — acrylic over oil — is not, and will eventually fail. That rule is absolute and it is why the medium order of a mixed-media painting has to be planned before the first mark.

Everything slows here. A glaze needs to dry before the next one. In July that can be four or five days rather than two. There is no way to hurry it that does not compromise the painting, and this is the real reason a commission takes the time it takes.

Stage seven: knowing when to stop

The hardest part, and the part academic training actively works against.

I was taught to resolve everything. Contemporary painting mostly lives in what stays unresolved — the raw edge, the passage that is not explained, the corner of canvas left almost bare. Learning to stop was harder than learning to paint, and I am still not entirely good at it.

My working test is this: I put the painting somewhere I will encounter it unexpectedly, and I watch what my eye does when I walk into the room. If it goes to a problem, there is a problem. If it goes where I want it to go and then wanders around the canvas comfortably, the painting is done.

The signature goes on last, in a colour taken from the painting itself rather than black. Then it is turned to the wall and left alone for weeks before varnish — and in this climate, months. I wrote about why that wait matters in the framing and climate guide.

What the process is really for

None of this is method for its own sake. The layers exist because a painting that was built in stages holds a viewer longer than one that was made in a single pass. There is more to find. You see it across a room, then you see something else at two metres, then something else again with your face thirty centimetres from the canvas.

That is the thing a photograph of a painting cannot transmit, and it is why I still ask people to come and see work in person if they can.

If you want to see how these layers read in finished pieces, the collection is here. And if you are curious about why I move between acrylic and oil at all rather than choosing one, I wrote about that too.