ACE-I-E-I-O

So I’ve been sort of intrigued by ACEOs* for the past couple of days, after picking up a wee little pack of pre-cut illo-board cards in the ACEO size and a book full of fascinating ATCs.

Thing is, there’s no WAY I can draw that small. I look at some of this stuff on-line and my jaw drops. I do not have that kind of mad micro skills. My fingers are not fat, but they are fumbly.** I look at people painting miniatures that you could lose in your ear canal, using size 0 brushes and needles, and my brain gets melty. There is some wonderful art done on these things. I will not be the one doing (oh god, NPR mentioned Joe the Plumber again, please kill me now) it, however.

But I do have the digital skills, and a really kick-ass printer, and gel medium and I have always liked some of the little collagey things some people do out of vintage papers and whatnot (although I have little skill in their physical assembly.) I’m sort of tempted to set up the collage digitally, print the layers separately, cut ’em out and assemble, then fool around with pen and ink and all that stuff. (Then I could scan THAT, convert it to a digital print, print it, and find myself staring into a freakish alternate dimension opened by the production of recursive art…) 

Mind you, I have no idea if anybody would want to BUY such a tiny collagey thing, or what I’d sell it for, and while it would be an original collage of digital elements, I’m not sure how anybody would feel buying THAT. And I wouldn’t mind offering very teeny LE prints, for that matter — the smallness of the size appeals to me as much as anything. A wee little original and maybe a series of 8 prints or something (that being the number one could fit on a single sheet of paper…) I think I just like the idea of being able to put them out on the table at cons, since I like the mini-print format quite a lot. They’d have to be really cheap, obviously–like $2 apiece or something for the prints–to be feasible, I suspect, but still.

I dunno, I may muck about with the idea a bit. I don’t have any interest in just doing really tiny paintings, per se, but I love the format and the potential.

*Art Card Editions and Originals, little thingies done on any surface 2.5 x 3.5 in size. AKA Artist Trading Cards, except that apparently there’s a grumpiness if you sell an ATC, so the ACEO is identical to an ACT, but you’re allowed to sell it. (You kinda get the feeling that the bland wikipedia statements about this dichotomy conceal a wealth of internet rage, flame-wars, and name-calling. The pixels just sit there innocently on thepage, but somewhere behind them, you smell burning. Mind you, I could be nuts.)

**Witness the Butter Knife Incidents. Yes. Incidents, plural. Kevin takes cover when I open the cutlery drawer now.

Leave a Reply