Our art group had another meeting and this time we painted miniature landscapes. These were so fun. They are quite small, only 1.5″ x 2.75″ in the painted part and the paper is cut to an inch bigger than that vertically and horizontally. These were painted with a limited palette of mainly greens, little bit of blue, browns, white and if you wanted, an accent color. Because they are so small, they don’t take much time and you can work on multiple paintings at one time.
Here are Louise and Paula at the start. I didn’t get a lot of process photos because I got too busy and forgot.
Here are my first two pieces of watercolor paper taped down to a plastic board. The tape is right up to the edge of the paper so that a border of white is left after removing the tape. We used acrylic paints, small brushes and palette knives to paint with.
Paula was painting three at a time and has the most experience in painting these. It’s just a few swipes of green for the foreground and then painting in the sky with scrumbled blue and off white (or you can use other colors as you like). You are supposed to deliberately be “vague” with your mark making to give a resemblance to trees and other landscape such as bushes or mountains. Because the piece is so small, it is difficult to get too precise anyways.
Here are Louise’s three. She used a bit larger piece of paper on two of them. It’s amazing to pull off the tape and the painting looks better.
Here are Sally’s landscapes. The one in the middle is framed by a white matte.
Here’s six that Paula painted. She is very good at the abstract methods of painting these.
Here is one of mine. I put the US penny in to let you see the scale, very small!
Here are the other three that I painted. I enjoyed making these. Because they are small, I didn’t feel like I was “wasting” a canvas or watercolor paper like I sometimes do when creating/painting at a larger scale. This small, thumbnail size might be fun with wool too.