Tiny Worlds: Creating Miniature Art

Calling all miniacs!

In this class, students will learn essential techniques to create a variety of realistic textures and effects for painting miniature sculpture, ultimately creating their own tiny worlds easily built right at home. Students will learn painting basics like edge highlighting, glazing, washes, and weathering to achieve the effect of transforming clay into the appearance of wood, metal, and other materials. They will also be introduced to a range of pioneering artists who create miniatures, including Patrick Jacobs, Joe Fig, Charles Simmonds and Frances Glessner Lee, in addition to early examples of dollhouses, dioramas and miniatures from folk art. Topics discussed will include seminal writing on the psychology of miniatures from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and Susan Stewart’s On Longing. Students will ultimately create their own tiny dioramas using painted oven-bake clay working from observation and imagination.