Picture a demonstration on a cruise ship: five hundred people, drinks in hand, chatter everywhere — until a medium starts to draw. By the time Mia holds up the finished portrait, the room has gone completely silent, and people are gasping and crying. One of her colleagues, who stood beside her that night, still describes it as the moment the whole audience was moved at once. That's spirit art. Here's what it actually is.

Soul portrait, spirit portrait — what's the difference?

Two related crafts, one pencil. A spirit portrait is a drawing of a person in the spirit world — someone the artist has never seen — produced during the connection, which the sitter then recognises. It's mediumship where the evidence ends up on paper instead of in words. A soul portrait (Mia also calls them soul pictures) turns the page toward you: an artistic interpretation of your soul's energy, channelled onto the page. Not your face — what she senses in you. People who receive one tend to find it strangely, sometimes tearfully, recognisable.

How can you draw someone you've never met?

The honest answer is the same as for all mediumship: the mind receives the energy and translates it — here through the hand. And Mia is disarmingly honest about her part in it. Comparing herself to a classically trained artist colleague, she once told the circle: she is a brilliant artist — I have to rely on spirit, because I was not an artist in that way. Her background is craft, not canvas: before mediumship she was a tin- and silversmith with her own engraving business. The likeness doesn't come from art school. It comes through the connection.

There's even family backup, as she tells it: when she doubts her spirit art, the grandfather who was a famous blacksmith — an artist in iron — is the one who steps forward to steady her. Art runs in the line; spirit supplies the faces.

Why does Mia call it the most nerve-wracking thing she does?

Because a drawing can't hedge. Spoken evidence can be explored, refined, asked again. A portrait just sits there, right or wrong:

Mediumship is one thing, but when you're doing spirit art, it's your little baby — you're never so nervous as when you do spirit art.

After thirty-plus years, she still stretches herself at it — deliberately drawing outside her comfort zone, still taking weekend courses in faces, still treating every portrait as proof worth fighting for. Even the teacher keeps practising. Especially the teacher.

Can anyone learn spirit art?

It's a talent like the rest of this work — which in Mia's world means one thing: practised, not bestowed. You don't need to be "good at drawing" any more than you need a perfect singing voice to let spirit speak. The connection does the heavy lifting; your hand learns to get out of the way. Inside the circle, spirit art and soul portraits sit alongside mediumship, trance, healing and psychic development as one more door into the same room — and some members discover it's their door, the way of receiving that finally feels natural.

That's the quiet point of all of it, whether the pencil draws a face from the spirit world or the colours of your own soul: it's one more way of saying you are seen, you are real, and you are not making this up.