Dave packs a painting into only half an inch

9:23am Monday 26th November 2007

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SIZE, as they say, matters. Especially if you are Dave Williams, who usually operates on two inches but has been known to pack everything into a mighty half-inch.

Because this former milkman from Kidderminster is a leading specialist in miniature paintings. Or "pint-sized pictures" as some of the wags would have it.

Everything in his artistic world is reduced. Sort of Worcestershire's "Rem" without the "brandt". It began with a request from a friend to paint some tiny pictures for a dolls' house and has led to Dave's own website and a customer base that stretches from Germany and Holland to America and New Zealand.

He said: "It's difficult to keep up with the demand. The challenge is to keep making them smaller and smaller. So far I've got down to a half inch square."

All of which is a far cry from his early morning jaunts with the daily delivery.

Dave, aged 56, said: "Although I worked as a milkman, I have always been interested in painting and was quite good at art at school. I've always tried to keep my hand in.

"I've never had a professional lesson. I learned to paint all by myself. It was just determination,"

And that might have been that. Just another enthusiastic and talented amateur artist like all the others who paint riverside, cathedral-side or sit gazing across windswept landscapes throughout the country with passers-by peering over their shoulders.

It was the dolls' house request that turned his painting path at right angles. "A friend wanted some tiny pictures to hang on the walls of their dolls' house. I'd never done anything like it before, but I decided to have a go and found it fascinating, " he said.

So fascinating that two-and-a-half years ago he became a full time miniature artist and says: "I think I would find it difficult to consider going back to full-scale work now."

Probably the most amazing part of all this is that Dave completes the most intricate sections of his paintings by the naked eye, without any visual aids at all and certainly not a magnifying glass.

He said: "You need a good light, But I have to take my reading glasses off for the fine detail. My optician has told me I should keep them on, but I find glasses just aren't good enough, so I concentrate hard."

Considering that he has painted more than a thousand miniature masterpieces and that every one is different, I should think Dave has a medicine cabinet full of headache tablets and bought shares in pharmaceutical companies too.

He paints mostly in watercolour and because of the specialist nature of the job, his kit is a bit special. "I use the best quality material I can get. Acid-free paper and the best paints. The brushes I use probably cost around £5 each, but by the time I've shaved them down to the very fine points I need and got them just how I like them, they're worth £100 each to me."

These days Dave doesn't only paint for the dolls' house market. Because there is a whole world out there that collects miniature paintings. A miniature, by the way, is classed as anything seven inches by five inches or smaller and Dave's average output is a lot smaller than that.

He likes to think of his work as "traditional English scenes that capture the English way of life." So he specialises in painting pubs, castles and old houses, as well as rural settings.

He works from his own pencil sketches and photographs and occasionally images from books. An average miniature would take him three to four hours, some longer, some shorter. "I am told people can recognise my work by my skies. I have my own technique for painting a sky," he said.

Dave's work has caught the imagination of collectors worldwide, particularly in America where he has an enthusiastic trade.

"The good thing is that when people have bought them, they often come back and have more. I'm having a job to keep up. It was a bit of a gamble when I decided to paint miniatures full time, but it's been worth it."

You can see some of Dave Williams' output on his website www.harvington.com The cream of the crop, you might say. Other suggestions on a postcard. A very,very small one.