4 simple reasons I created a collection of miniature paintings

My energy has been in particularly short supply this year for lots of different reasons but it’s felt quite demoralising that the bad days have outweighed the better ones. And when I did find small pockets of energy I just didn’t want to sit and draw or paint. I wanted (and no doubt needed) to keep resting.

But more recently I’ve found some very slightly bigger pockets of energy and decided to use them very very carefully.

1. Energy has been in even shorter supply

Last year I really enjoyed painting landscapes in my sketchbooks. They were no bigger than A4 and I would spread a single landscape out across a number of days but even that felt too much this year.

2. Focusing on quality rather than size

So instead I went tiny and painted some miniature landscapes on tiny pieces of paper that were just 4cm square. I still wanted them to feel special so I used 100% cotton paper and made tiny squares with hand torn edges.

I used acrylic gouache, which is water resistant, to help make give the paintings a longer lifespan.

3. Working in tiny blocks of time

And even then I painted in very short blocks of time. A few minutes here and there to add layers of colour and finish with details on top.

4. Quick progress

What’s been good about working at this small scale has been that I’ve seen progress with my work really quickly.

It goes without saying that putting a wash of paint on a 4cm square of paper is a lot quicker than on a large sketchbook page, and that’s been good for these times when I don’t have the energy for much more.

Challenges

Working so small has been a real challenge and meant that there’s nowhere to hide when a mistake happens. Quite a few paintings didn’t make the cut. I can see one of those ‘rejects’ from where I’m sitting now, peeping out from between boxes of art materials on a shelf near my desk.

On days when I feel like I can’t do anything, or can’t manage to do the things that I want to do it’s often helpful to break tasks down into tiny steps (e.g. 1. Run a bath, 2. Get in the bath, and so on).

And often that works well for my creative work too. Breaking a drawing or painting down into different stages that each feel more manageable and much less overwhelming than the whole piece of artwork might seem.

Making miniature paintings felt like I was taking this step-by-step approach even further, by creating a project where each step was already tiny by nature. So each day I could feel satisfied that I’d made some progress, even if that involved just a wash of colour on a 4cm square piece of paper.

And the results have been really pleasing. I’m proud of these tiny paintings and they encompass so many things that I might have liked to have created in a larger painting but with the bonus that they fit perfectly around my health.

They’ve been a really nice quick(ish) ‘win’. Tiny paintings are perfect for tiny pockets of energy.