A paint by numbers kit is four or five items in a box, and the difference between an enjoyable evening and a frustrating one usually comes down to one of them. Here is what each part is, what it is actually for, and where the poor versions cut corners.
The pre-printed canvas
The most important part, and the one where quality varies most.
You want cotton canvas that has been primed before printing. Priming is the thin white ground that stops acrylic soaking into the weave. On an unprimed or thinly primed surface a single coat looks starved and patchy and you end up painting everything twice.
The other thing to check is how it arrives. A canvas folded flat into a slim box has hard creases along every fold line, sitting exactly where the paint has to go, and they do not press out. A canvas rolled into a tube arrives with a soft curl that relaxes overnight under a few books. Ours ship rolled for that reason, and it is the thing our own reviewers mention unprompted more than anything else. We go into it in rolled versus folded canvas.
Sizes are not standard across the industry, whatever a listing implies. Ours are 12 by 16 and 16 by 20. A smaller canvas is not an easier one — the design has the same number of sections, so shrinking it makes every section smaller and the job harder.
The paints
Numbered pots of acrylic, matched to the design and mixed so no color-mixing is required at your end.
The thing that matters is how they are packaged. Acrylic in a friction-lid pot dries out while a kit sits in a warehouse, and a meaningful share of the one-star reviews in this whole category are people opening a box to find half the pots skinned over. Vacuum-sealed pots survive storage. If a listing does not say how the paint is sealed, it almost certainly is not.
Acrylic dries fast, which is mostly an advantage on a numbered canvas — adjacent sections stop bleeding into each other quickly — and a nuisance if you want to blend. It is also why only the pot you are using should ever be open.
The brushes
Brushes in a range of sizes, and the range matters more than the count. Fine work and broad areas want genuinely different tips, and reaching for the smallest brush for everything is slow and gives a worse result.
Be honest about what a kit brush is. It is adequate rather than excellent, and the very finest detail on a busy design is easier with a good separate liner brush. Several of our own reviewers say exactly that, and there is no point pretending otherwise. If you paint regularly, one decent size 0 or 1 round is the single best few dollars you can spend on this hobby.
The reference print
The part people overlook until they need it.
Detailed designs have small printed numbers — that is geometry, not a printing fault. What saves you is a full-size reference you can hold beside the canvas rather than a thumbnail on a box lid. Ours is an 11 by 17 print showing both the finished painting and the numbered layout, which means when a section is unreadable on the canvas you can find it on paper instead.
The frame, or the lack of one
A framed kit arrives with the canvas already stretched over a wooden frame. It is rigid to paint on, it does not need mounting afterwards, and it is ready to hang the moment you finish. Our framed kits also include an easel; the unframed ones do not.
An unframed canvas is a loose sheet. It is cheaper and it posts flat, and it needs stretching or mounting later. One thing to check before assuming you can do that: some unframed canvases are trimmed so close to the printed edge that there is not enough spare material to wrap around a frame and staple. If mounting matters to you, buy framed. Our guide to framing a paint by number canvas covers the options.
Setting up
Do not iron the canvas. This advice circulates widely and it is wrong. Heat can damage the primer and the printing, and an iron on a printed canvas is a good way to ruin one. If your canvas has a curl, lay it flat under a few heavy books overnight. If it has hard creases, it was shipped folded, and ironing will not fix that either.
Light from the side, not overhead. A lamp placed at an angle throws a slight shadow into the printed lines and makes them far easier to read. A daylight-temperature bulb helps on dark designs, where several deep colors can look identical under a warm bulb.
Cover the table, and keep water away from the canvas. A jar of rinse water knocked over onto a half-finished canvas is the most common accident in this hobby. Put it on the far side of your working hand.
Damp brush, not wet. Rinse between colors, then press the brush out on a cloth. A brush carrying water thins the paint on the canvas and you lose coverage — this is the single most common cause of a section that will not hide its number.
Photograph the blank canvas before you start. If a number disappears under paint later, you can zoom in on the photo and find it. It costs nothing and saves a lot of guesswork.
Covering the printed numbers
Pale colors — yellows, creams, pale blues — will not hide a printed number in one coat. This is normal and it is not a fault in the paint.
The answer is two coats, with the first allowed to dry properly rather than having a second worked into it while wet. If a number still shows, a thin base coat of the white from the kit, dried, then the color over the top, will do it.
What not to use: correction fluid, and white colored pencil. Correction fluid is a brittle film that acrylic does not bond to well and that can crack later. Colored pencil is waxy and will repel water-based paint. Both circulate as tips and both cause more trouble than they solve.
Techniques worth knowing
- Two thin coats beat one thick one. Thick acrylic sits proud of the surrounding sections and can crack as it cures.
- Blending — softening the seam between two sections while both are wet, using a barely damp clean brush. Only where the edge is soft in reality: skies, water, the turn of a curved surface. Not on hard objects. Our guide to blending on a numbered canvas covers it properly.
- Dry brushing — a nearly dry brush dragged lightly over a dried area to suggest texture. Good for bark, grass and fur.
- Highlights last. A highlight is the brightest small area on a lit form, and it goes on at the end, over dry paint. It is not an outline around a section.
- Varnish is not the same as gloss medium. Medium is permanent; varnish is designed to be removable later. If you want to seal a finished canvas, use a picture varnish and wait at least a week. Our note on varnishing an acrylic painting explains the difference and the isolation coat that goes between them.
When a color runs low
It happens, and the claim that it does not is one of the standard untruths in this category. On most designs one or two colors do the heavy lifting — a sky, a field, a stretch of water — and those pots are the ones that run down near the end.
If a pot has stiffened rather than emptied, a drop or two of water stirred in with a cocktail stick usually brings it back. If it is genuinely empty, we keep a matched extra paint set for every design, which is the reason we make them. Trying to color-match acrylic by eye at a craft store rarely ends well.
Working order
Background first, then large forms, then detail. Top of the canvas downward, so your hand rests on finished areas rather than wet ones. One color at a time right across the canvas, rather than section by section — it is faster and you stop losing track.
Within that, most people find darks before lights works better. Pale colors are thin and will cover a dark that has strayed slightly over a line; the reverse very rarely works.
If this is a first canvas, our beginner's guide walks through a whole kit from opening the box, and everything we make is in the full collection.
