ACEO Tiny Paintings!

I have been painting teeny tiny paintings called ACEO's for quite a few years now. ACEO stands for Art Cards, Editions and Originals. Basically a tiny painting/drawing/print/etc which must be 3.5 x 2.5 inches, about the size of a playing card, and as I have discovered people love collecting them!

A 50p piece to show the scale!

I hadn't painted any new ones for quite a while but after my recent visit to the local zoo, and taking a few hundred photos whilst there, I decided to paint a few more. Two of these tigers have sold already!

I find them a very good way of seeing if a larger painting will work as if an image really stands out when tiny it should work on a larger scale. For example the tiny painting of a tiger that I recently did I liked so much I made it into a big acrylic painting.

I think it has also made me paint a lot freer as its very difficult to get a lot of detail onto a tiny piece of paper and I feel it has really improved my watercolour painting. Also because I'm quite an impatient painter and hate waiting for paint to dry, I find that when I'm doing a large watercolour painting I try and work on about 10 ACEO's at the same time. By the time I have put a layer of paint on every painting the first one will have dried and I can start all over again!

So far I have sold 401 of these mini paintings with tigers and cats proving the most popular and the majority going to the USA! 

A few examples of my tiger ACEO's, I'm rapidly running out of titles for these!

Most of my ACEO's I sell on Ebay or Etsy and its a really good feeling when people come back for more and have a little collection of my mini artworks!

Clare xx