How small is small?

Post-It Notes

I mentioned that I'll be painting on canvases that are 3x3 inches big. You know those square Post-It notes you see everywhere? Those are 3x3 inches big.

While I'm not going to be painting on anything nearly as small as a grain of rice -- or sculpting the tip of a pencil, neither do I have the training (or magnification equipment) that those tasks require. I'll be going at this with brushes you can buy in any art supply store (the small ones), and regular acrylic paint (the kind they trust schoolkids with) -- nothing exotic.  So 3x3 inches is pretty darned small under the circumstances.

The funny thing is, there doesn't seem to be a phrase for what I'm doing.  Formal "miniature art" guidelines tend to refer to scale rather than actual size (that is, a 10x10 inch painting of a building is a miniature, but a life-sized butterfly is not), and while that is what I'm doing, that really isn't my intention at all.  I'm painting miniatures, but I'm also just painting small.  Maybe that is what I'll call it -- painting small.