Most guides to painting supplies read like an inventory of an art shop. This one is a shopping list. You need far less than the lists suggest, and the things worth spending money on are not the things beginners usually spend it on.
For a numbered kit specifically, what you actually need is shorter still, because most of it is already in the box.
One clarification first, because the two get mixed together constantly online: this is about artists' materials. Rollers, nap lengths, spackling compound and wall primer belong to a different job, and a brush sold for cutting in around a doorframe will not do what you want on a canvas. The same distinction decides whether a blank canvas kit or a numbered one is the right buy.
The starter kit that actually works
Assuming acrylic, which is the sensible first medium for most people:
- Seven tubes of paint. A warm and a cool version of each primary, plus titanium white. Something like cadmium red and alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow and lemon yellow, ultramarine and phthalo blue. Add burnt umber if you want an eighth. This mixes almost anything.
- Three synthetic brushes. A medium flat, a small round, a small filbert. Three good brushes beat a set of twenty poor ones and it is not close.
- Canvas panels. Cheap, rigid, and you will not feel bad painting over them. Buy several small ones rather than one large one.
- A palette. A ceramic dinner plate works perfectly. So does a sheet of glass.
- Two water jars. One to rinse dirty, one to rinse clean. This one small habit noticeably improves color.
- A rag or paper towel, and a pencil.
That is the whole list. Everything below is refinement.
What to upgrade first
In this order, because the return on each drops off sharply:
- Brushes. The single biggest difference in how painting feels. A brush that holds its point and springs back does half the work. A splayed brush makes a competent painter look clumsy.
- Two or three artist-grade tubes of the colors you use most. Student paint is weakened with filler, which is fine for backgrounds and disappointing in mixes.
- A stay-wet palette. Keeps mixed acrylic usable for days instead of twenty minutes. If you mix your own colors it pays for itself fast.
- A better surface. Stretched canvas or a wood panel, once you are making things you want to keep.
What to skip
- The 48-color set. Tempting and a trap. You learn color by mixing it, and a large set means you never do. It is also mostly colors you will not use.
- The 24-brush set. These are almost always low-grade filaments that splay within a few sessions. Buy three good ones.
- An easel, at first. Working flat on a table is fine. Propping a panel against a stack of books gets you most of the benefit for nothing.
- Mediums. Retarder is genuinely useful for acrylic. The rest can wait until you have a specific problem to solve.
- Palette knives, airbrushes and specialty tools. Buy them when a technique you want to try requires one.
Choosing a medium
Acrylic
The practical default. Water clean-up, no solvents, no smell, dries in minutes, sticks to nearly anything. The one real drawback is that fast drying makes blending difficult, which a retarder partly solves. Best for: most people, small spaces, anyone who wants to see a finished thing the same day. Our basics of acrylic painting guide covers it properly.
Oil
The most forgiving to paint with and the least convenient to own. It stays workable for hours, so blending and reworking are easy, and the color range is unmatched. Against that: solvents, ventilation, drying times measured in days, and a genuine fire hazard from oil-soaked rags. You will also need a ground and an understanding of fat over lean, which our linseed oil guide and the priming guide both cover. Best for: people who want to blend, and who have a ventilated corner they can leave set up.
Watercolor
The cheapest to start and the hardest to control. A pan set, two brushes and a block of paper is the entire kit, and it packs into a bag. But it is unforgiving, because you cannot cover a mistake, you can only work around it. Buy proper watercolor paper before you buy better paint. Paper matters more than pigment here, and 140lb cold press is the standard. Best for: sketching, travel, people who like working small.
Gouache
Watercolor's opaque relative. Water-based, matte, covers what is underneath, and can be reactivated with water after drying. It sits usefully between watercolor and acrylic. Best for: illustration and flat areas of color.
Brushes, briefly
Shapes. Flat gives a square mark and a clean edge. Round gives a line that varies with pressure. Filbert is a flat with rounded corners for softer-edged marks. Rigger is long and thin for consistent fine lines. Fan is for texture and blending, and you can skip it at first.
Material, which depends entirely on the medium. Synthetic for acrylic, because natural hair swells and goes limp in water and acrylic is hard on it. Stiff natural bristle, traditionally hog, for oil, because it moves thick paint. Soft hair or good soft synthetic for watercolor, because it holds a lot of water and releases it slowly. Buying an expensive sable for acrylic is spending more to get a worse result.
Care, which matters more than price. Wash before the paint dries. Never stand a brush on its bristles, in water or anywhere else, since it bends the filaments permanently. Reshape the head and dry flat, because water sitting in the ferrule loosens the glue. A cheap brush treated well outlasts an expensive one treated badly.
Surfaces
Canvas panels for practice, stretched canvas for work you want to keep, wood panels when you want a smooth surface for fine detail, paper for watercolor and sketching. Whatever it is, it needs priming unless it comes primed, and our gesso guide explains why.
Safety, in three lines
- Dry pigment. If you are ever handling loose powder, wear a mask. Cadmiums, cobalts and lead white are toxic and the risk is inhaling dust.
- Solvents. Ventilate. Odorless mineral spirits is not the same as harmless, and a closed room is the problem.
- Oily rags. Rags soaked in linseed oil generate heat as the oil cures and a crumpled pile can ignite on its own. Dry them flat and separately, or soak them in water and seal them before disposal.
The shortcut
There is an argument for not assembling any of this at first. A paint by numbers kit arrives as a complete matched set, usually for less than buying the components separately, and it removes the two decisions that stall beginners: what to paint and which colors to use. What is left is handling the brush, which is the thing you actually want to practice.
Ledgebay kits include a pre-primed cotton canvas printed with the design and rolled in a tube rather than folded, acrylic paints vacuum-sealed so they arrive wet, brushes in a range of sizes and an 11 x 17 reference print. The framed sizes come stretched on a wooden frame with an easel and hanging hardware. The catalog has the full range, extra paint sets exist for every design, and custom paint by numbers from a photo works from a picture you upload.
Then, once the brushes are out and the habit has started, the seven tubes and three brushes at the top of this page are the natural next purchase.
