A miniaturist is someone who paints very small pictures, often for money. For a long time this meant a tiny portrait — a face small enough to sit in a locket, a little case, or a frame you could hold in one hand. The pictures themselves are called miniatures, and the painter is the miniaturist. People still use the word for artists who work at that tiny scale, not only in the old locket style: a miniaturist may paint a whole scene on something no bigger than a card, with a very fine brush and a lot of patience. You meet it in art, museums, and history more than in everyday chat. It is a specialist job-word, not a joke-word for “anyone who likes small things”. Though actually, the mini-feeling in miniature did not start as “small”. The old pictures were named after a red paint used in book decoration, and only later did miniature come to mean “a tiny picture”. Students sometimes stretch miniaturist to mean a person who builds small models or collects tiny houses. Those people are model-makers or collectors. A miniaturist paints.

細密畫家（畫極小幅肖像或細密畫維生的人；不是做模型的人）