Miniature Art – Why consider painting in miniatures?

“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.” – A.A. Milne

Do you remember playing with miniature toys as a child? I do. My mom used to buy and assemble kitchen toys for me because she knew how much I loved cooking—a skill I learned from my dad, who was a chef at a big hotel in Manila. Those tiny pots and pans were my treasures, and I spent hours pretending to cook delicious meals just like my dad.

One of my fondest memories is building my own miniature swimming pool. I dug an A5 notebook-sized hole in the soil and lined it with mixed cement I obtained from a nearby construction site. Once it dried, I filled it with water and spent countless days making my dolls swim in it. My friends’ dolls often joined in on the fun, and we had the most wonderful times together.

However, one of my biggest disappointments as a child was never owning a dollhouse. We couldn’t afford one back then, and I often dreamed of having a beautiful dollhouse filled with miniature furniture and decorations. My imagination would run wild with visions of tiny rooms and elaborate setups, creating a perfect little world for my dolls to live in. I wanted to fill my imaginary dollhouse with beautiful miniature paintings because even as a child, I dreamt of owning fine things in life.

My Miniatures

Even the smallest works of art can express volumes. Just like my larger paintings, I pour the same amount of love and attention into my tiny artworks. The beauty of miniature paintings lies not only in their charm but also in their practicality. They allow me to save on expensive art materials before committing to a larger piece.

These tiny canvases serve as a perfect testing ground, enabling me to experiment with how the subject interacts with the background, explore tonal values, and refine perspectives. Each miniature painting is a practice run, helping me perfect the final composition for my larger works. Through these small masterpieces, I can explore new ideas and techniques, ensuring that every detail in my larger pieces is thought out and beautifully (hopefully) executed. Though the execution in larger pieces can have different outcome, it’s also nice to create thumbnails for future reference – for when I decide to paint bigger version especially when a client asks me to.

Oh by the way, if you need art materials, I made a post about where to get your supplies here in the Philippines:

Affordable Art Materials for Watercolor Painting and Where to Get Them in the Philippines

The gallery below shows some of my works in miniatures. I have laminated some of them to make bookmarks and had given away a few as birthday gifts along with books. You can also see from the pictures and the video below the gallery that I have a painting kit for miniatures which consist of tiny brush (from my Winsor and Newton field set), tiny magnetic 8-well palette, mixing palette, water jar, papers, and pocket-sized pencil which I talked about at length in my previous blog post: My Personal List of Best Mechanical Pencils for Sketching and Writing.

You don’t need to have the same miniature painting kit as mine. Any watercolor palette will do. But it’s really important that you have good pieces of cotton paper, the kind designed for wet-on-wet watercolor painting technique and small brushes for the small washes and details. Here’s a link to the Princeton brush set for miniature painting that you might want to consider, this is reel by a famous local miniature artist, Nina Hidalgo:

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Finally, here are miniature resin palettes I made that I have just turned into jewelries as part of my fashion statement pieces:

Thank you for reading this far!

Cheers,