Mini Painting Series.

Back in early November, I started a series of mini paintings that I did while streaming on Twitch. I’m not sure why but something was drawing me to paint on really small canvases. Perhaps it was because I could sit down at the desk to paint them. I’ve always enjoyed sitting at a desk and working on a craft of some sort. When I was a young boy, I would sit for hours in my room at my desk painting and building model cars. While painting large landscapes, you could sit and paint them, it’s better to stand and paint do to the canvas size and large brush strokes required at times. After standing for a while, it can get a bit uncomfortable depending how long the painting takes to complete.

There were other reasons I started the mini paintings but they were not the main driving factor. Another reason was that my large canvas paintings were starting to pile up. I was not selling many of those paintings so doing at least one painting a week was starting to produce a lot of paintings and no where to put them. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem. I can just stop painting at any time. However, I’m a Twitch streamer now. I have to produce content on a regular basis. That requires either doing art of playing a video game. My computer couldn’t handle both gaming and streaming at the same time so that only left art to stream.

Combined with the piling up of paintings, I was starting to run out of ideas. My brain wanted to create something new but I was unsure what to create. I mean, sure, I could just continue doing Bob Ross paintings. He’s got over 400 paintings I could follow but it started to get a little boring to me. Don’t get me wrong. I love his method and still watch him quite often to fall asleep. But the more I painted his paintings, the more it felt like merely copying. It wasn’t my own. I wasn’t painting for me anymore. I felt like I was painting purely to provide some sort of content. My heart wasn’t in it and I think my viewers were starting to take notice. The fire was dwindling.

Now I can’t be sure how the spark was lit to do mini paintings. I think the idea sort of jumped in my head while I was shopping for some oil paint. While at the store, I picked up some 4 x 5 inch canvases from Michael’s because they were on sale. That’s not where the idea came from however. I think it had been incubating in my head ever since the Twitch artist Kitslam started doing his Lord of the Rings mini painting series. I thought that it looked fun. I think that’s when the idea was planted. It started growing when I found the mini canvases on sale. Then one day I decided to make it happen.

Being such small size canvases, I decided to initially paint them in acrylics. Small canvases and small brushes made it easy to work with on a small area of the desk. I just put the paint on some palette paper and had a mug of water for washing the brushes. What I was painting on these mini canvases was previous paintings I had already done on the normal size canvases. I was going in order that I did them originally.

Now it may seem contradictory that I was painting my old Bob Ross paintings on small canvases but what made it fun and new was the different medium and the challenges with that as well as the small canvas. Also, sitting down at the desk working on something small reminded me of when I was young and building model cars.

I’ve painted with acrylic paint before but it was just monochrome black and white. On these paintings, I had the challenge of painting Bob Ross landscapes that were originally done with oil paints in his wet on wet technique with acrylic paint. The first challenge that presented itself was the sky. I didn’t have any mediums to use so getting the sky covered evenly, in one color or blending multiple, was difficult. I found that spritzing the canvas with a mist of water helped it spread a bit better and more evenly. That was the main challenge in all of it. Without mediums, I find that thin coats of acrylic paint are difficult to blend and apply. One of the other frustrating things was how fast acrylic paint dries. Now I’ve heard that there are mediums that slow the drying process but of course I didn’t have those available. Not only does it dry fast on the canvas, it dries fast on the palette as well.

I had a limited palette of colors for these as well. I just used a basic set of acrylics that I got at the art store. Nothing fancy. Using just 12 colors, I was able to closely match the overall tonal value of my original paintings. It was quite fun as well. A few paintings in, I bought a couple more colors to expand the palette a bit. I only added Hooker’s Green and Raw Umber. These colors allowed me to make darker shadow tones. Along with the basic paints, I just used brushes from a basic acrylic brush set. Definitely nothing fancy. My favorite brushes from that set were the angle brushes and the bristle brushes. The angle brush made painting trees easy and the bristle brushes were great for adding texture. The round brushes were ideal for bushes and clouds.

Not all the mini paintings I did were painted in acrylics. There were some I tried in oil as well. If a sky had multiple colors to blend, I did it in oil most of the time. The northern lights mini painting definitely had to be done in oils. I have seen some spectacular norther lights type paintings done in acrylic but I’m not quite sure how to pull that off myself.

There are four main types of mini paintings I did. There were the tiny 2 x 2 inch paintings on canvas board. I glued a bit of magnetic strip on the back to make them into magnets.

I did paintings on stretched canvases both 3 x 3 inches and 4 x 4 inches that came with their own mini easel. A few were 4 x 5 inch stretched canvases both acrylic and oil. I also painted on canvas board magnets. These were magnets I didn’t have to glue anything to the back of. I did a variety of circles and squares. Scroll through the gallery and have a look for yourself.

This little series was fun to do for a while. After awhile however, I started to get bored of it. I’m not sure if it was the medium or the paintings I was doing. I guess it started to get repetitive. I haven’t quit doing them entirely but I did take a little break. I’m still going to do them from time to time. They are the perfect item to sell on my Etsy shop. If you want to get your hands on any of these little gems, they are available in my there.

Be sure to follow my Twitch channel to see these come to life. Following my social media will ensure you see these little works of art as they are completed. Happy Painting!