Filling every region with its numbered color produces a correct painting. What separates a correct one from a good one is a handful of things done after the numbers are satisfied, and none of them require any drawing ability.
All six are optional, and all six are reversible, because acrylic covers itself.
1. Lose the outline completely
The most important one, and the reason most finished kits read as printed rather than painted. If you stop each color short of the printed line, every shape ends up with a thin pale halo around it, and the eye reads the whole picture as a diagram that has been colored in.
Carry each color slightly over the line rather than up to it. Where two regions meet, the second color covers the join. At the end, look across the surface at a shallow angle in good light and touch in any black outline still visible, using whichever color it borders.
2. Soften two or three edges
Not all of them. Two or three, in the right places.
Real edges vary. A rooftop against a sky is sharp; the boundary between two bands of cloud is not. On a numbered canvas both arrive as the same hard line, and softening the ones that should be soft is the quickest way to make a picture look observed.
Do it while both regions are still wet: run a clean, barely damp brush along the join a few times, pulling in alternating directions. Acrylic gives you a short window, so work on one join at a time. Clouds, mist, distant hills and the far edge of water are the places worth doing. Our note on wet on wet acrylic covers how to hold that window open.
3. Stipple the foliage instead of filling it
Trees on a numbered canvas are drawn as clumps of solid color, and painted flat they look like clumps of solid color. Painted with the tip of a brush held upright and bounced against the canvas, they look like leaves.
Fill the region normally first, let it dry, then stipple the neighboring numbered green lightly over the boundary between the two. The transition breaks up and the mass reads as depth. A worn-out brush is better for this than a good one.
4. Add the shadow the kit did not
This is the biggest single upgrade available and it takes about ten minutes.
Find the darkest color in the kit. Find the two or three deepest shadows in the picture: under an eave, beneath a boat where it meets the water, the underside of a bridge arch, the base of a tree trunk. Add a small amount of that darkest color into just those places, thinned slightly, blended at the edge.
Then do the reverse with the lightest color, on the two or three brightest points only: the top edge of a cloud, the rim of a wave, the lit edge of a roof.
The kit has flattened the range in order to make the picture printable. Extending the darkest darks and the lightest lights by a fraction restores what was lost. Be sparing; four or five touches across a whole canvas is the right amount, and the temptation to do twenty is the mistake.
5. Dry-brush a texture pass
Take a brush with barely any paint on it, most of it wiped off on a cloth, and drag it lightly across a dry region. It catches only the raised weave of the canvas and leaves a broken, granular mark.
This is how you get sparkle on water, weathered wood, rough stone and the texture of a track or a beach. Use the next lightest numbered color over the base color, and go carefully; it is easy to overdo and hard to notice when you are close to the canvas. Stand back every few strokes.
6. Give it a second coat where it needs one
Hold the finished canvas up to a window before you decide you are done. Anywhere a printed number still ghosts through gets another pass. This will nearly always be the pale colors, because they are covering black ink, and it is not a defect in the kit.
Two thin coats also look better than one thick one. Thick paint leaves ridges that catch the light across the finished picture and empties the pot before the canvas is finished, which is the most common way a project gets abandoned. If you do run short, there is a matching replacement paint set for every design.
Then stop
Knowing when to stop is a real skill and there is no rule for it. What there is instead is a good habit: put the canvas somewhere you will pass it, leave it a full day, and look at it from across the room rather than from eighteen inches away. Anything that still bothers you at that distance is worth fixing. Anything that only bothers you up close is not.
Finishing properly
Paint the edges if it is a stretched canvas, or paint them a single flat color. A raw white edge is what makes a piece read as unfinished from across the room.
Wait a week after the last brushstroke, then put a thin, even coat of acrylic varnish over the whole thing. It evens out the patchy sheen between thick and thin passages and gives you a surface you can dust. Matte keeps the flat look; gloss deepens the colors.
And sign it. A small mark in a bottom corner in one of the darker colors. You spent ten to twenty hours on it.
For the working order that gets you to this point efficiently, see the best way to do painting by numbers. The two techniques underneath most of the above are covered in layering acrylic paint and underpainting with acrylics.
