Easy is not a property of the kit, it is a property of four specific things you can see in the picture before you buy. Learn to read those and you can judge any design in about ten seconds.
our five gentlest designs are the ones that score well on all four.
On a blank canvas the problem is a different one, and ten easy things to paint is a list of subjects that work on a first or second attempt.
The four things
How big the sections are. The single strongest predictor. If a color area is narrower than the brush, it takes several passes with the tip, and there may be hundreds of them. Look at the busiest part of the artwork and ask whether you could cover it in one stroke.
How many colors, and how close. Twenty distinct colors is fine. Twenty of which six are near-identical mid-greens is not, because you spend as long checking pots as painting. Heavy foliage, water and skies are usually where the crowded palettes live.
Whether there is a clear range from dark to light. A design with real darks and real lights is easier to work through and more forgiving, because errors sit within a strong structure. A design that lives entirely in pale mid-tones gives you nothing to judge against.
The subject. Trees, rocks, foliage, clouds and open water forgive an imprecise edge. Animal fur, faces, water reflections and anything architectural do not, because the eye knows exactly what those should look like. Natural subjects are the clearest case of that, which is why they are so unforgiving.
The designs that suit a first canvas
These are the ones our own customers most often describe as a good place to start.
Rural Route Bluebirds is two bluebirds on a mailbox with white blossom. One clear subject, generous sections, and a strong separation between the birds and the background.
Away From it All is a small pine island on flat, calm water. Large areas of sky and water, very little fine detail, and the kind of design where progress is visible fast.
Summer's Song is a canoe at a lakeshore at dusk with a lantern. Warm, simple shapes and a clear light source.
House Near the Lake, Guiding Light, Northwoods Retreat and Hummingbird also come up repeatedly as first canvases that went well. Be Still, a single white chair on a beach at sunrise, is the simplest composition in the catalog.
What to avoid for a first attempt: Mountain Village, Seaside Paradise, Golden Hour, Orchard Puzzle and Bamboo Tiger. All excellent, all genuinely demanding.
Buy the larger size
The most useful piece of advice on this page and the one people ignore. The same artwork at 16x20 has sections about a third wider than at 12x16, and correspondingly larger printed numbers. Nothing else you can buy makes a canvas easier by as much.
The setup does the rest
- A lamp on the opposite side to your painting hand. Otherwise your hand shadows the exact section you are working on.
- The canvas tilted, not flat. Flat on a table means viewing everything at an angle, and your neck pays for it.
- Two water jars. First rinse and clean rinse. Most muddy color is a dirty brush rather than a mistake.
- Somewhere it can stay set up. The canvases that get finished are the ones that do not have to be packed away each evening.
Order of work
Top to bottom, so your hand never lands on wet paint. One color at a time, which saves a great deal of rinsing. Darks early, because straying into an area that will later be dark is invisible and the reverse is not. Background before foreground, for the same reason.
Two thin coats on the pale colors, letting the first dry properly. Light paints are the least opaque and a single heavy coat leaves the printed number showing through the middle.
One thing not to do
Do not apply gesso to a numbered canvas. This gets suggested surprisingly often and it would cover the printing, which is the entire content of the kit. Our canvases arrive pre-primed cotton, ready to paint. Gesso is for raw surfaces you are drawing on yourself.
Equally, do not thin the paints to make them flow. Thinning reduces coverage, which is the opposite of what a pale section needs. If a pot has genuinely stiffened, one drop of water stirred in is the limit.
Our beginner guide walks a first canvas through end to end, and the whole catalog is in one collection — worth judging by the artwork rather than the names, since several of the titles do not describe what the picture shows.
