There is no single correct way to paint a numbered canvas, but there is an order that makes the work quicker, cleaner and less tiring than any other. It is not complicated. Most people arrive at it eventually, usually after making the same three mistakes on their first kit.
Here it is in advance.
Before you open a single pot
Lay the canvas flat and give it an hour if it arrived rolled. It will relax on its own. Do not iron it and do not weight it under anything with a hard edge.
Set the light before you set anything else. An adjustable lamp coming over your shoulder from behind, not the ceiling light. Working under a ceiling light means working in your own shadow, and that alone accounts for most complaints about numbers being hard to read.
Two jars of water. One to take the worst off the brush, one to rinse clean. A single jar is gray soup within the hour and puts that gray into every color afterwards.
Prop the reference sheet up where you can see it rather than flat on the table. Ours is an 11 by 17 inch print for exactly this reason.
Tilt the canvas. Raising the far edge fifteen or twenty degrees, on a couple of books or a small tabletop easel, is the difference between an hour of painting and an hour of neck ache.
The working order
1. One color all the way across, then the next
This is the whole method in a sentence. Open one pot, find every region on the canvas carrying that number, paint them all, close the pot, rinse, move on.
Three things follow from it. You are not cleaning the brush every two minutes. Related colors get laid down side by side in one sitting, so you can see the difference between them rather than matching from memory an hour apart. And the canvas fills quickly, which matters more than it sounds like it should when you are eight hours in.
2. Largest areas first
Sky, water, fields. They go fast, they build confidence, and they establish the overall tone of the picture so that everything you place afterwards has something to sit against.
3. Dark before light, not the other way round
You will read everywhere that you should start light and work dark. Think about what covers what. Every region on the canvas has a black printed number in it, so your pale colors already need two coats. Dark covers light far more reliably than light covers dark, so doing the darks first means you are never dragging a dark brush across pale work you have already finished.
If you would rather not think about it at all, ignore both rules and simply go by size. The order matters far less than the consistency.
4. Top down, and away from your painting hand
Work from the top of the canvas toward the bottom so your wrist is never resting on something you painted twenty minutes ago. If you are right-handed, work left to right within that. A sheet of clean paper under your hand takes care of the rest.
5. Carry each color over the printed line
Not up to it. Slightly over it. Where two regions meet, the second color covers the join.
This is the single thing that separates a canvas that looks like a painting from one that looks like a filled-in coloring book. Stopping short of the outline leaves a pale halo around every shape, and once every shape has one, the whole picture reads as printed rather than painted.
6. Leave the finest work until last
Rigging on a boat, window frames, the eye of a bird, lettering. By the time you reach them you have had ten hours of practice with the brush, and the areas around them are dry, so a slip is recoverable.
Handling the paint
- Wipe the brush on the rim before it touches the canvas. Too much paint leaves ridges that catch the light, and it empties the pot early. Running out of a heavily used color is the most common reason a canvas gets abandoned.
- A drop of water, not a brush-load. If a pot has thickened, add water a drop at a time and stir properly. Past about a quarter water you are diluting the binder as well as the pigment, and the paint dries chalky and will not cover.
- Close every lid. An open pot skins over while you work on something else, and a skinned pot is a lost color.
- Never stand brushes in the water jar. The bristles bend against the bottom permanently and water works into the ferrule.
The last hour, which is worth more than any hour in the middle
- Hold the canvas up to a window. Anywhere a printed number still ghosts through gets a second coat. This is almost always the pale colors and it is not a fault in the kit.
- Look across the surface at a shallow angle in good light and touch in any black outline still showing, using whichever color it borders.
- Paint the edges if it is a stretched canvas. Carry the picture around the sides or paint them a single flat color. A raw white edge is what makes a finished piece read as unfinished from across the room.
- Wait a week, then varnish. A thin, even coat of acrylic varnish evens out the patchy sheen you get between thick and thin passages and gives you a surface you can dust. Matte keeps it flat; gloss deepens the colors.
How long all of this takes
Ten to twenty hours on a 16x20 for most designs, spread over a few weeks. Some of ours run nearer twenty-five. We have gone into it properly in how long a paint by number takes.
If this is your first one, our guide for beginners covers choosing a design, and layering acrylic paint covers the technique that makes the most difference to the finished picture. The mistakes to avoid are collected in what makes a paint by number look bad, and the designs themselves are in the full collection.
