Once you have finished two or three canvases, the numbers stop being the difficult part and something else becomes interesting: how to make the result look painted rather than filled in. That is what this is about. If you have not painted one yet, start with the basic tips instead and come back.
What makes a finished canvas look like a paint by number
Three things, and all three are fixable.
Hard boundaries everywhere. Real paintings have edges of varying sharpness. A knife edge on a rooftop, a soft one where a cloud meets sky. A canvas painted strictly section by section has the same crisp edge everywhere, which is what the eye reads as mechanical.
Flat, even color inside each shape. A single tone laid on with uniform pressure has no life in it.
Uneven sheen. Different pigments dry to different finishes, so a canvas in raking light looks patchy in a way that has nothing to do with your painting.
Softening an edge, safely
The most useful single technique, and the one place where restraint matters most.
Wait until both adjacent sections are completely dry. Take a fine brush, load it very lightly with the lighter of the two colors, wipe most of it off on a rag, and feather short strokes across the boundary from the light side into the dark. A nearly dry brush deposits a broken, partial layer, which is exactly what a soft edge looks like.
Where to use it: cloud against sky, mist over water, the far edge of a hill, the outer edge of a shadow, the point where fur meets background.
Where not to use it: architecture, horizons, anything reflective, the edge of a face. Those want to stay crisp. A painting where everything is soft looks worse than one where everything is sharp.
Never do this by blending two wet neighbors. Pulling wet acrylic into wet acrylic across a boundary is how you get mud, and it is irreversible on a printed canvas. Dry first, always.
Dry brushing
The same nearly-dry brush, used to add texture on top of a dry section rather than across a boundary.
Load lightly, wipe most of it off, and drag the brush so the bristles skip across the surface. It leaves a broken deposit that catches the weave. Good for sparkle on water, the lit edge of foliage, the grain on weathered wood, the highlight along a bird's wing.
Use a color already on the canvas, one step lighter than what is underneath, and stop early. Two passes look like light. Six look like a mistake.
Stroke direction
Costs nothing and changes everything on animals and foliage.
The numbered shapes have already been drawn running the way the subject lies: the way fur grows, the way needles hang, the way water moves. Pull the brush along that direction rather than dabbing at the section, and the surface reads as the thing it depicts. Dab at it and the same shapes read as patches of color.
Turn the canvas so the stroke always comes toward you rather than twisting your wrist to follow the shape.
Varying tone within a single section
Only worth doing on large areas: a sky, a field, a stretch of water.
While one section is still wet, add a touch of a neighboring numbered color at one end and work it in without leaving the boundaries of that section. The area stays broadly its intended color while gaining a slight shift across it, which is what stops a big field looking like a wall.
The rule is that you stay inside one shape. This is a variation within a section, not a blend across a boundary.
Highlights the design did not include
Once the canvas is finished and dry, a very small number of added marks can lift it noticeably.
- A few points of light on water, dry brushed, following the direction of the ripples.
- A thin rim of the lightest color along an edge that faces the light source: a shoulder, a roofline, the top of a wave.
- A slightly darker line where two objects meet the ground, which sits them down instead of letting them float.
Three or four marks total. The discipline here is entirely about stopping. If you find yourself adding a tenth, put the brush down and look at it tomorrow.
Two things not to do
Do not paint thickly. Impasto and palette-knife work are real techniques and they are wrong here. Thick paint buries the printed lines you still need, dries with ridges that catch the light, and looks out of scale against sections laid on thinly. Thin coats, always, and a second thin coat rather than one heavy one.
Do not glaze the whole canvas without testing. A thin unifying wash over a finished painting is a legitimate technique, and on a paint by number it very easily goes muddy and cannot be undone. If you want to try it, test on the white border first and expect to leave it alone.
Finishing
Let the canvas cure for several days. Touch-dry is not cured.
Then varnish, which is the single easiest improvement available. A clear acrylic varnish evens out the patchy sheen between colors, deepens them slightly, and disguises any repaired areas by putting everything at the same finish. Lay it on flat, in two or three thin coats, matte for anything hanging opposite a window. Full detail is in the care guide.
Sign it in a bottom corner with a fine brush and a color already on the canvas.
Choosing a canvas that rewards this
Some designs give you more to work with. Dusk and night scenes, where the interest sits in a handful of bright areas against a broad dark ground, respond well to added highlights. Water and mist reward edge softening. Animal designs reward stroke direction more than anything else.
Busy, evenly detailed canvases give you the least room, simply because there is no large calm area to work into. All 39 designs are in the catalog, and a custom canvas from your own photograph is worth considering at this stage, since a photograph carries more tonal steps than a designed kit and gives these techniques more to do.
Common questions
Will softening edges make it look messy?
Only if you do it everywhere. Pick three or four boundaries on the whole canvas, all of them places where the real subject would be soft, and leave the rest crisp. Contrast between sharp and soft is the point.
Can I use my own paints for the extra work?
Yes, and for highlights it is often easier to buy one small tube of titanium white than to eke out the kit's lightest color. If you need more of a kit color, each design has a matching set in the extra paint collection.
I have gone too far and it looks worse.
Let it dry and paint the section back in with its original number. Acrylic is opaque and nothing here is permanent, which is exactly why it is worth experimenting. There is more on repairs in fixing mistakes. Going beyond the numbers deliberately is a different question from repairing a mistake, and worth treating separately.
Should I do this on a gift?
Only on a canvas you have already painted the plain way at least once. Learn the technique on something for your own wall.
How do I know when to stop?
Stand six feet back. If you cannot see the change from there, it was not worth making, and the next one will not be either.
