Mixed Media Progressions.
You've been throwing away your best starting points.
Mixed Media Progressions is a series of lessons in watercolor, acrylic, graphite, charcoal, crayon, and ink — layered together, in any order, on anything you've got. Including the pieces you already gave up on.
You've got a stack of paintings that didn't work. A watercolor that got muddy. An acrylic that went flat. A sketch that fell apart halfway through. Right now they're sitting in a drawer or heading for the trash.
They shouldn't be. They're the best material you have — because they already have color, texture, and history on them. A blank sheet of paper has none of that.
This course teaches you how to stop starting over and start building on top of what's already there.
What You'll Learn
How graphite, charcoal, watercolor, acrylic, crayon, and ink each behave — and how they behave differently depending on the surface underneath
How to build a piece in layers where the drawing underneath still shows through the paint on top
How to work without a fixed sequence — starting with any medium and responding to the surface as you go
Transparency and opacity as design decisions — when to let a layer show through and when to cover it completely
Resist — how crayon or oil pastel under a wash creates texture no other technique can produce
How to look at an old reject and see what it's already doing right — then build on that instead of starting over
How to generate raw material on purpose — texture sheets, color fields, torn scraps — and turn them into a finished collage piece
Who This Is For
This course is for the artist who has a drawer full of paintings they're not happy with. The watercolor painter who keeps getting frustrated with control. The acrylic painter who wants to loosen up. The sketcher who's ready to see where a drawing can go once paint enters the picture.
You don't need to be equally skilled in every medium. You need one thing: a willingness to layer on top of what didn't work instead of throwing it away.
This is the seventh and final course in the Deconstruction Lab foundation cycle — the place where everything you've learned about structure, value, and composition converges into one expressive, layered practice.
Materials Used
Surfaces
Stretched canvas
Unstretched canvas
90lb drawing paper
Acrylic painting paper
140lb cold press watercolor paper
Paint
Heavy body acrylics
Holbein artist grade watercolors
Daler-Rowney acrylic inks
Drawing Mediums
Graphite
Vine charcoal
Compressed charcoal
Prismacolor colored pencils
Artist grade crayons
Brushes & Tools
Small and medium bristle or synthetic brushes (old ones are fine)
Two water reservoirs
Paper towels
Old rag
Note - you don’t need all off these materials so long as you have watercolor, acrylics and some drawing mediums such as graphite and charcoal. You can always add more mixed media later on.
Full materials list with links available on the website →
This course is part of the Deconstruction Lab ecosystem.
Mixed Media Progressions builds directly on the system taught in the foundation courses. Before diving in, here's what's recommended:
Highly Recommended
Drawing Is Everything — the core philosophy and progression system. Referenced throughout this course.
Values & Color — value structure and the tonal vs. chromatic system are used extensively in every section.
Design & Composition - Pre-painting decisions. The blueprint. What goes where and why.
New to art or drawing?
Drawing Fundamentals — start here before anything else. Covers observation, line, mark making, and structural drawing from the ground up.
The Deconstruction Lab
A complete foundation pathway
Drawing Is Everything - The philosophy. Everything builds on top of this. You don't have a drawing problem. You have a thinking problem.
Drawing Fundamentals - Structure is the permission slip. This is where you build it.
Values & Color - Most painting problems aren't color problems. They're value problems. This fixes that.
Design & Composition - Most painting problems aren't paint problems. They're composition decisions you never made.
Watercolor One: Loose On Purpose - Watercolor isn't fragile. This course proves it.
Acrylic One - Most acrylic courses teach you how to finish a painting. This one teaches you how to think with paint.
Mixed Media One (You Are Here)