Mixed Media Art Portfolio
What Mixed Media Means to Me
I don't stay inside the lines, and neither does my work. Mixed media lets me cut things open, ink bleeding into paint, the same way I've had to pull my own identity apart and stitch it back together in pieces that don't quite match.
'British Robin' (2023) by Kaye Outhwaite, Mixed Media on hot-pressed card, US Postcard. © 2023 Kaye Outhwaite. All Rights Reserved.
British Robin (2023)
British Robin, created by me in mixed media with ink and paint splattered without restraint, cut through with failing pencil and pen lines. This piece captures a small bird singing through winter, inspired by the messy, unclean departure from the UK.
The background is built from watercolour flicked and splattered straight from a loaded brush, radiating out across the page in explosive, uncontrolled marks against the bare paper. Around the bird's silhouette and running down from the branch, colour bleeds and blooms wet-on-wet, soft-edged and allowed to run where it wants. The feathers themselves are built from dense, closely-spaced diagonal pencil strokes following the direction of the plumage, giving them a soft, almost fur-like texture, while the branch is sketched with a light, slightly wobbly hand rather than precise ruling, keeping the whole piece spontaneous rather than controlled.
The robin is one of the only British birds that sings through winter, when every other voice has gone quiet. I think about that a lot. When I left the UK, it wasn't clean; it was full of heartbreak, and standing as a lone voice.
This piece is built from that mess. Ink and paint are splattered on without permission, bleeding where they shouldn't, cut through with pencil and pen marks trying to hold a line that keeps failing. Chaos fighting control on a small US postcard.
The robin itself is territorial and fiercely protective of a patch of ground. And when the UK stopped being safe to live in, that's when I had to take flight. No neat goodbye. Just an aggressive mess.
'An Elephant Never Forgets' (2022) by Kaye Outhwaite, Mixed media on watercolour paper, US Postcard. © 2022 Kaye Outhwaite. All Rights Reserved.
An Elephant Never Forgets(2022)
An Elephant Never Forgets, created by me in mixed media with layered paint and ink built up until the surface holds weight like aged skin. This piece captures an elephant's memory and endurance, inspired by anti-poaching concerns and the quieter, ongoing threats of pollution and habitat loss.
Elephants remember. That's not sentiment; it's fact. Matriarchs carry information about water sources, dangers, and family relations across decades. Memory like that deserves to be respected by humanity.
Behind the head, red watercolour bleeds into the piece, blunt and unmissable. This is an anti-poaching piece as much as anything else. It's also about what's quieter than poaching but just as final: pollution, overfarming, land stripped back until there's nowhere safe left standing for elephants. An elephant can remember every drought, every route to water, every threat it's outlived, but memory doesn't save you from a world that keeps shrinking around you.
To symbolise the elephant’s amazing memory skills, I have tried to show time through the elephant’s skin texture, every crease and fold a record of time, of everything survived. I built the texture of this piece the same way: layers of paint and ink worked over and over until the surface holds weight, the way old skin does. Nothing about it is smooth. Nothing about surviving that long ever is.
Description:
The Traveller (2024) is a striking black-and-white skeleton illustration that blends minimalist linework with symbolic depth. Rendered in ink with deliberate shadows, the artwork portrays a lone skeleton entwined with a backpack, an evocative image of eternal wandering and the human condition.
This is a one-of-a-kind original artwork and comes with a Certificate of Authenticity
It is the only one available, and once sold, it cannot be reproduced or repurchased.
Details:
Medium: Ink on paper
Dimensions: UK A5
Year: 2024
Framing: This artwork is provided unframed
Ships: rolled up in a shipping tube.