Each painting is 2 inches by 2 inches (5cm by 5cm) hand painted with acrylic paint on a 4 inch by 4 inch (10cm by 10cm) square of thick 130lb watercolour paper.

Each of my Tiny Expanses paintings represents about 2 hours of work. This includes acquiring supplies, preparing the paper, researching images, corresponding with photographers, painting, cleaning, photographing, editing photos, and adding them all to my website. This does not even include the amount of time it takes to post everything on social media.

An artist's work is about 50% painting and 50% other hidden work. You could say that other work isn't "painting" but if I didn't do it, you wouldn't be seeing the final product. So it is actually an important part of the painting.

When you purchase an artwork from me, aside from the skill and time required to create the piece, you are paying for essential behind-the-scenes work. You are getting a true labour of love.

There were several reasons for choosing to paint small for this collection:

A) It's rather unique. Not very many people can paint so small and I happen to enjoy doing it.

B) I could fit in short painting sessions between my family responsibilities and other commissioned work.

C) They're more affordable for collectors. With Mother's Day and graduation season coming up, I wanted to offer pieces that could be giftable. Small works on paper also cost less to mail.

D) The gallery space isn't very large so I wanted pieces that would suit that space.

Here's the real and rather uninspiring reason: I chose to do 100 paintings because it sounded like a nice number. Also because I'm hopelessly ambitious. The marketer side of me had seen people do a 100 day project on Instagram and it seemed like a great exercise in developing my skills while hopefully gaining some viewership so I decided I would try it too. Do I regret choosing such a big number? A tiny bit. (See what I did there?) 😉

All the Tiny Expanses are painted with acrylic paint. I used a combination of heavy body, fluid, and OPEN (slow drying). The paintings are done on watercolour paper primed with gesso.

I bought a set of extra fine miniature painting brushes which I used for the smallest details like trees, ripples in the water, and sunbeams.

To get the crisp edges, I used washi tape, which I removed at the end of painting.

The paintings were numbered in the order in which I painted them. Some days I would do only one and other days I would do up to five. I kept track of the order in which I did them by their numbers.

At the gallery, they are displayed by numerical order.