Andrew E. Mitchell was born in Elora, Ontario, Canada, March 10, 1877 to Robert and Martha Mitchell. He had 5 siblings…Loren, Suzanne, Eva, Elinor and Bessie who died as a young child. Discouragement, illness, lack of formal education, difficult circumstances, which tend to hinder most people, seemed to serve as a driving force to the life of Andrew. His father Robert died when he was at the age of ten. As a young man he moved to Detroit to support the family with his artistic talents at the famed J.L.Hudson department store. 

Suffering from tuberculosis he moved to Denver to seek a better climate and work. Ill and jobless, he prayed on a park bench one night for healing, and was miraculously healed. (The full story of this healing is in his long bio at the blue button below.) He found work for the Denver
Post, and established his own commercial
design business downtown Denver. For years
he worked as a creative artist for the timber,
mining, and real estate interests of the west,
traveling by stage and narrow gauge railroad
over the mountain state, drawing birds-eye
view maps and creating advertising material
for the promoters.

He was inspired by the great evangelists of the day (see the story of Frank L. Higgins on the Victory Vase page of this site) and while traveling by train he took his large harp with him and conducted church services for miners in mining towns. 

Andrew married Sadie Bryant in 1902, having met at church through mutual friend and artist Curtis Chamberlin, who later helped found the Laguna Beach Art Association. Andrew and Sadie had four children, Bryant, Hubert, Helen and Jean. 

Andrew built a cabin in the hills overlooking Rifle and established a small farm there. By 1913 the family moved to Los Angles to the Echo Park area. He built an art studio behind their home, and it still stands today.

Andrew began working on sacred plaques (he called them mottos back them) while in Colorado around the turn of the century. We can see that the simple style of lettering in this plaque above tells us it is an early one. He carved his plaques in clay, created metal molds for them, fired them in aluminum and hand-painted them. He built a plaque workshop and storage room in Echo Park. During WWII he could not use aluminum for the plaques so he created rubber molds and made plaster plaques, instructing missionaries on the plaque making process for evangelism.

Elements we see often in his work:
Flowers, birds, scrolls, wood, stones,
Bibles, crosses, crowns, hearts, pine
branches, etc. He often created
plaques in a shield shape, which
could have began around the time
he created the original shield logo for
Del Monte and designed other product
labels for many industries.