"Canvas paint kit" covers two quite different products, and buying the wrong one is the most common way a new painter ends up with a box in a cupboard. One gives you materials and leaves the picture to you. The other gives you the picture and leaves you the painting. Neither is better; they solve different problems.
The blank-canvas starter set
Typically a few stretched canvases, a set of acrylic tubes, an assortment of brushes, a palette and sometimes a small easel.
What you get: complete freedom, and the materials to paint anything, repeatedly. Canvases are reusable in the sense that you can paint over them, and a set of tubes lasts a long time.
What it costs you: every decision. What to paint, how to draw it, which colors to mix, where the light comes from. For someone who already draws, that is the whole appeal. For someone who has not painted since school, it is where the box goes in the cupboard, because a blank canvas is a much harder starting point than it looks.
If this is the route you want, start smaller than you think, work from a photograph you took yourself so the composition is already decided, and accept that the first several will be practice.
The numbered kit
A canvas pre-printed with the design as outlined sections, each carrying a number, and a set of paint pots numbered to match.
What you get: the drawing and the color are already resolved. There is nothing to mix and nothing to plan. What is left is the part most people actually wanted, which is the hours with a brush and a picture appearing.
What it costs you: the picture is somebody else's. You are painting a specific image, and when it is finished that design is finished.
The useful thing to notice is that this is not a lesser version of painting. It is a different activity, and the reason it works is the removal of decisions rather than the removal of skill.
What is actually in a Ledgebay kit
- Pre-printed cotton canvas, shipped rolled in a tube rather than folded, so it arrives without creases to flatten
- A full set of acrylic paints, vacuum-sealed so they arrive moist rather than as dried discs
- Brushes in a range of sizes
- Printed instructions and an 11x17 printout of the design, which is what you read the numbers off
- Framed sizes also include a wooden tabletop easel
Sizes are 12x16 framed, 16x20 framed and 16x20 unframed. Framed canvases arrive already stretched on a wooden frame and hang on a nail the moment you finish. The unframed canvas is trimmed close to the printed edge, so it suits mounting to a board rather than stretching over your own bars.
You need nothing else except water, a paper towel and a lamp. No palette, because there is no mixing. No solvents, because acrylic cleans up in water.
Choosing a design
The designs are licensed original artwork rather than stock images, which is why they hold together as pictures: cabins on still water, songbirds, lakes at dusk, garden flowers, coastlines. Browse landscapes, animals, flowers, cabins and ocean and water, or everything in the catalog.
Two honest notes. There is no abstract line, no portrait line and no reproductions of famous paintings here, so if that is what you want this is the wrong shop. And difficulty is per design rather than per size: broad sky and water are easy hours, while grass blades, feathers, distant foliage and small lit windows are where the tiny sections are. Take the 16x20 on anything detailed, because the same picture printed larger has larger sections.
If you want to paint your own picture without drawing it
A custom paint by numbers kit sits between the two options. You send in a photograph and it comes back as a numbered canvas with paints matched to it, in 12x16, 16x20 or 18x24, framed or unframed, printed in the USA rather than drop-shipped from overseas. The subject is yours; the drawing and the palette are handled.
Choose a photograph with clear light and one clear subject. Photographs taken indoors under a ceiling light convert poorly, and group shots need the larger size.
Which to buy
Buy the blank-canvas set if you already draw, or if what you want is to learn to paint from nothing and you are prepared for that to take a while.
Buy the numbered kit if what you want is twenty absorbed evenings and something on the wall at the end of them. A good many people do the second for a year and then find themselves buying the first, which is a perfectly good order to do it in.
The beginner's guide covers the mechanics, and other customers' finished canvases are in the customer gallery.
