 Welcome to Monet Café, Artistic Friends. This is artist Susan Jenkins and I'm excited about this art tutorial. You're going to learn so much today. I'm calling it Tiny Treasures. I'm painting these little tiny gems. They're all called art trading cards. I'm going to do six of them. Now, I will have an extended version of this video where I go into more instruction. You get a little bit more if you're one of my patrons on my Patreon page. It's only $5 a month, but I give my patrons a little something extra. And if you'd like to learn more about painting small or artist trading cards, I do have a few other videos on my channel. I'm going to try to organize them in a playlist, probably called small paintings. And a very quick thank you to my patrons. Because of my patrons and their support on my Patreon page, I was able to purchase the iPhone 11 Pro Max, which is an amazing camera. The video quality and the ease of me being able to produce my videos is going to be so much better. So everyone should thank my patrons because it's making Monet Cafe better in many ways. But now the video quality is going to be awesome. So let's do this video. I am starting out using these artist trading card sized pastel surfaces. I'm also going to be sharing with you how I'm getting my reference photos. So here we go. Now, what is an artist trading card? They are basically small surfaces for painting that are 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches. Of course, you can use them vertically or horizontally. They come in different colors. These particular ones that I'm using are by Color Fix. It's a company, Art Spectrum's the company, and the paper or the surface is Color Fix. I didn't realize Art Spectrum was in Australia. How neat is that? I'm going to provide a link to where you can get these. I had a hard time finding these actually. I've had these for a while, but I'm going to put a link in the about section. Now keep in mind, you don't have to use particular artist trading cards from a company. You can make your own. These are some that I made with Sennelier La Carte pastel card. Well, except for that one. I'm not sure what that one is. I have another video on painting small where I describe how the whole history of artist trading cards came about. They're officially called A-C-E-O. That stands for Art Cards, Editions, and Originals. Later in the video, I'm going to be showing you how you can even get these nice little clear bags that I use often. I actually use a different company, but I'll be showing at the end of the video how to put your tiny works of art, your tiny treasures into these, and some other goodies as well. Now here's a really fun part about this painting project that I did. I decided to take my little grab bag. I call it of reference photos. It's images I've printed out over the years, and I just I have a bigger one too, but I just thought let's just paint whatever we pull out of the grab bag. So I literally take images and randomly pull them out and just paint them. What does this do? It causes you to be spontaneous, and it also helps for you to not have to spend so much time searching for a photo. And sometimes we pick our personal preferences when we should probably paint some things that are a little out of our comfort zone. So that's why this grab bag reference photo process is going to be neat and I highly encourage it. Now I hope you enjoy while I create these six tiny paintings. Here on the Monet Cafe channel you will see all six paintings created, sped up a little bit to music. And this is the particular content that my patrons will receive. They've already received the extended version, where I go into actual painting instruction and more of an in-depth tutorial sharing more about the creation process and some art instruction. All right guys, enjoy. You guys are a blessing to me. There is more information, not just these sped up paintings, towards the end of the video. So keep watching. Little mini clear bags I used for the artist trading card sizes. Look how teeny they are. Again I used a company before called Crystal Clear. Now I use clearbags.com. They're great. They're less expensive. It takes a little finesse getting these into the bag. But once you do they're great. Now I wanted to show you they make the little frame cards also. I believe that one was from Strathmore that you can use to put your little artist trading cards in a little framed card to send to someone, even teeny weenie little envelopes. I don't know if you would mail it or just give it to them as a gift like that. And this is the company clearbags.com. You have to kind of search around to find the, what's it called, flap seal bags. Those are the ones that I use. But I'll provide a link for those in the video section or in the description section. Now here I'm just showing how, when I have a bigger painting, I normally put in some pastel painting and framing tips in with the painting along with my business card. And this just makes it nice, clean and very informative. Now that piece of foam board was too big for that. But I also put in a piece of foam board to keep the painting sturdy. And I didn't do it with these smaller paintings because it was kind of little. Now here's an example. This is an older painting of mine. I didn't have the framing tips and my business card in it. But here you can see how I put the foam board in to keep the painting sturdy. This makes it nice if you're doing an art show, sending it. It's easy for people to handle without messing up the pastel. And it's pretty easy to bring them in and out of the plastic bag. This is an example of another product. If you recall, I just did a little video where I painted some snowmen and I said there are some little frame card things you can insert your painting into. And this is them. They're also on ClearBags.com. You basically put your painting in one of the little ClearBags, slip it into the pre-made little framed card, and ship it. I might put some foam core in with this. If you're going to mail it to be safe, I think it would probably fit. These are my cards that I love by Moo.com. The neat thing about these cards is that I got the rounded corners, which is cool. You can get multiple images of your paintings in one order. You can choose up to, I think it's 50 different paintings. So you have a combination of paintings. A lot of times it's fun giving your cards away. People are like, oh, can I pick which one I want? It's kind of neat. Okay, I'm really going to speed this up and put all of these into the little plastic bags. Now here they all are in their little plastic bags, all ready to go. I got these little stands from, you can get them from like Michaels or Joanne. Sometimes I'll stain them like that one that you see there. But these are fun. They're great to give as gifts. They're a great way to practice. If you mess up, you can just throw it away. And there is so much to be learned from painting small. So if you are a patron of mine, you will be sharing your little tiny works in our Patreon group on Facebook. There's an exclusive group just for my patrons on Facebook. So wasn't that fun? As always, I have a great time here in Monet Cafe with you guys. If you have not subscribed, I encourage you to also find me on all these places you see here. All right guys, happy painting!