A living room is the room people actually sit in, and one large abstract canvas changes it faster than anything else you can hang. Color and shape do the work, and there is no subject to get right.
how wall art changes a room covers the rest of it, which is mostly scale and hanging height rather than taste.
Prepare Your Acrylic Paint for Some Pop Art
A paint by numbers kit is a canvas printed with faint outlines and a number inside every section. You match the number to the paint pot and fill the section in. Nothing to draw, nothing to mix, which is why an evening with one goes quickly and why abstract subjects suit the format so well.
Below are ten abstract paintings and abstract styles worth living with, and what each one does to a room. One note before you start: Ledgebay's own catalog is licensed representational artwork, so the last two sections deal honestly with where an abstract canvas actually comes from.
Our Top 10 Favorite Abstract Paint by Numbers
Choosing artwork that suits both your taste and the room it hangs in is an underrated skill. These ten cover most of the ground, from ornament to pure geometry.
1. Lady With a Fan
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter and a founder of the Vienna Secession. Lady with a Fan was still on his easel when he died in 1918: a figure drawn in a few unhurried lines against a background of flat, gold-toned ornament.
It is a forgiving piece to paint, because that background is pattern rather than perspective. Blocks of ornament, one section at a time. On a wall it reads warm rather than cool, and it sits well against wood and brass.
2. Mulberry Tree by Van Gogh
Van Gogh painted The Mulberry Tree in the autumn of 1889, and it is about as close as his landscapes come to abstraction. The tree is a mass of orange and yellow strokes against blue sky and pale rock, and from a few feet back the foliage stops reading as leaves and starts reading as pure color.
That makes it a good candidate for a numbered canvas. The sections are irregular, but the palette is small and the result forgives an unsteady hand.
3. Blue Flower Sea
Not every abstract has an artist's name attached, and the flower-field style is one of the most common. Blooms are reduced to shapes with no horizon behind them, usually in two colors that argue with each other. Pink against blue is the usual pairing.
It works in a room with a lot of neutral furniture, where a single high-contrast piece can carry the whole wall on its own.
4. Road With Cypress and Star
Van Gogh finished this one in May 1890, weeks before he left Saint-Remy. A cypress splits the canvas from top to bottom, with a crescent moon on one side and an oversized star on the other, and the road and the sky move in the same restless spirals.
It is the more demanding of the two Van Goghs here. The sky is dozens of small sections of near-identical blue, so it takes patience and a good lamp.
5. Modern Instruments
Instruments broken into flat, overlapping planes is a style with a long pedigree, running back through Braque and Picasso, and it turns up constantly in abstract work. A guitar body becomes a curve, a fingerboard becomes a stripe, and the picture holds together on rhythm rather than likeness.
Blues, greens and yellows are typical, and the flat planes make it one of the easier abstract styles to fill in cleanly. It suits a modern or semi-formal room.
6. Study: Squares With Concentric Circles
Wassily Kandinsky's 1913 color study is twelve squares, each holding a set of rings in a different combination. It is one of the most reproduced images in abstract art, and it was never meant as a finished painting. It was Kandinsky working out how colors behave next to each other.
As a canvas to paint, it is close to ideal for a first abstract: twelve small independent problems instead of one large one, so you can stop after any square and pick it up again later.
7. Portraits Reduced to Flat Color
A portrait turns abstract as soon as the skin stops being modeled and becomes flat planes of color: a green shadow, a violet cheek, a background of one solid tone. Work in this style usually leans on strong pattern in the clothing or a headwrap to carry the detail.
These are the pieces guests ask about. They also need a steady edge along the face, so they reward a small brush and good light.
8. Psychedelic Kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope work is geometry first: one shape repeated around a center until it closes, usually built digitally so the symmetry is exact. The effect from across a room is depth, because the eye reads the rings as space rather than as pattern.
Symmetry cuts both ways on a numbered canvas. The repeats make the palette predictable, but a section painted slightly off shows immediately, since its mirror image is sitting right beside it.
9. Mr. Cat
Animals given human dress, a bow tie or a mustache or a pair of wings, are a small and cheerful corner of abstract art, and they have been around far longer than the internet's cat pictures suggest. The style is loose on purpose: the point is character rather than anatomy.
Bright, flat and easy to read from across a room, it is the least serious piece on this list and the one most likely to make someone smile.
10. Composition IV
Kandinsky's Composition IV from 1911 is the ambitious one. He wrote about painting the way other people write about music, and the canvas is full of half-legible things, lances and a hill and two riders, dissolving into color.
Be honest with yourself about this one before you start. The sections are small, the colors are many, and it is the sort of canvas that takes a few weeks of evenings rather than a weekend.
Where an Abstract Kit Actually Comes From
Abstract kits are sold everywhere, and the quality varies far more than the listing photos suggest. Three things separate a good one from a bad one, and none of them are visible in a photograph:
- Rolled or folded. A folded canvas arrives with creases running through the image, and they never fully flatten.
- Sealed paint. Pots that are not sealed dry out in transit. Thick or half-dry paint is the most common complaint in the category, and a drop of water is the only fix.
- Legible numbers. Faint or tiny printing is the second most common complaint. A large printed reference sheet solves most of it; a lamp and a magnifier handle the finest sections.
Ledgebay does not sell abstract designs. Our catalog is licensed artwork, Kim Norlien's cabins and the Hautman waterfowl and Judy Buswell's florals, and it is representational by nature. If an abstract is what you want on the wall, the honest route is the one below.
Making Your Own from a Photo
The one abstract we can print is yours. Custom Paint by Numbers takes an image you upload and turns it into a numbered canvas, printed in the United States. Most people send photographs, a house or a dog or a wedding, but the process does not care what the image is. A pattern or a painting of your own comes back the same way: outlines, numbered sections, and the paints to fill them.
Finished ones, sent in by the people who painted them, are in the customer gallery.
Abstract Art Paint by Numbers - Conclusion
Abstract work carries a room differently than a landscape does. There is no window to look through and no story to follow, so what is left is color, scale and the space around it, which is why one large abstract usually beats three small ones.
Painting it yourself adds the other half. A few weeks of evenings, a section at a time, and the thing on the wall is one you can point at. If you would rather start somewhere representational, the full catalog is here, and how to paint abstract covers the technique side in more detail.
