An easel is the first thing beginners buy and often the last thing they need. Before spending anything, it is worth knowing what one actually does for you, because on a numbered canvas the answer is narrower than the catalog photographs suggest.
What an easel is actually for
It does three useful things and one useless one.
It saves your neck and back. Hours bent over a flat table is the most common complaint from people painting these, and it is the reason most worth spending money on.
It shows you the picture as it will hang. Seen flat on a table the canvas is foreshortened, and you judge the balance of it wrongly. Tilted up, you see what everyone else will see.
It displays the finished painting. An easel in a corner with a completed canvas on it is a perfectly good way to show the work, and a good many easels spend most of their lives doing this.
What it does not do, despite the imagery, is make you paint better. A steady hand on a table beats an unsteady canvas on a wobbly frame every time.
The version that costs nothing
Start here before buying anything.
Lay the canvas on a board or a large hardback book, and put a second book under the far edge. That gives you a shallow, completely stable tilt, it cannot wobble, it costs nothing, and it takes five seconds to adjust.
For a great many people this is the whole solution. Try it for a session or two, and if the only thing you still want is something more comfortable to look at, then buy.
What a first easel needs to do
Three things, in this order.
Hold a shallow angle
The most important and the least advertised. You want the canvas somewhere between fifteen and thirty degrees off horizontal, not standing near-upright.
Thinned acrylic creeps downhill on a steep surface, slowly enough that you will not notice until it has crossed a border. A shallow canvas also lets you rest the heel of your hand, and lets you read small printed numbers straight on rather than at a raking angle. Steep easels exist for oil painters standing back at arm's length. You are eighteen inches away.
Many cheap easels have a fixed angle, and it is usually steeper than you want. Check this before anything else.
Not move
Press a hand against where the canvas will sit. Any give at all will show up as spoiled edges. Stability beats every other feature and it is worth paying for ahead of storage compartments, wood species or adjustability you will never use.
Have a ledge that actually holds the canvas
A shallow lip a framed canvas can tip off is a real problem rather than a small one.
What to spend
Nothing. The book method above. Genuinely fine.
A small amount. A tabletop A-frame or a simple tabletop H-frame. This is the right first purchase for almost everyone painting a numbered canvas. It sits on the table you were already using, it folds away, and afterwards it displays the finished piece.
Moderate. A tabletop drafting easel with a proper adjustable angle and a movable lower support. Worth the step up if you paint often, because you can set the tilt to suit the session and raise the canvas so you are not looking down at it.
More than that. A floor easel. Only worth it if you have somewhere to leave it standing, and only if you paint standing up, which almost nobody does with these.
What to skip
Storage compartments, unless you genuinely have nowhere to leave paints out. They add cost and weight to solve a problem a shoebox solves.
Capacity for large canvases. Almost every easel sold will take a 16x20, so buying for a 48-inch canvas you may paint one day is money spent on nothing.
Portability, unless you actually intend to paint away from home. It is the feature people pay most for and use least.
One thing worth knowing about our kits
Our framed kits include a wooden easel. The unframed canvases do not. So if an easel is part of what you are weighing up, the framed sizes already answer it, and you may not need to buy anything at all.
If you want to compare the types properly, our guide to easel types for paint by numbers works through what each one is for, and choosing an easel by your own constraints covers space, posture and budget in more detail.
Whatever you paint on, the working habits matter more than the furniture. Our nine practical tips covers those.
