Landscapes are the most popular subject in paint by numbers and there is a practical reason for it. A landscape gives you large coherent areas, sky, water, a field, that fill quickly and show visible progress within the first hour. And there are no faces, which is where kits most often disappoint, because a face needs a great many small sections to read correctly and any of them being slightly off is immediately obvious.
our seven favorite landscapes are the ones that hold up on all of those counts.
That does not mean every landscape is easy. The range within the subject is wide, and the product photo tells you more than the description does.
What makes a landscape easy or hard
Difficulty comes down to section size and section count, not canvas size. Zoom into the busiest corner of the product image before buying.
Generally approachable
- A large open sky, which is often a third of the canvas in only a few tones
- Calm water with simple reflections
- A clear single subject: one cabin, one boat, one tree
- Strong directional light, which separates the colors cleanly
Genuinely demanding
- Dense foliage. A forest in full leaf can carry thousands of tiny sections and it is the single most common reason a landscape kit gets abandoned.
- Broken water. Ripples and detailed reflections mean hundreds of small irregular shapes with no repeating pattern to settle into.
- Dawn and dusk palettes. Beautiful, and they often carry twenty near-identical oranges and mauves that are almost impossible to tell apart in the pot. Test every one on scrap first.
- Snow. Looks simple and is not. Snow is painted in subtle blues, violets and grays, and getting them in the wrong sections shows badly.
- Towns and harbors. Many small buildings mean many hard straight edges, and straight edges are unforgiving.
The technique that transforms a landscape
If you learn one thing, learn aerial perspective. Objects further away are lighter, bluer, and lower in contrast, because you are looking through more atmosphere to see them. Distant hills are pale blue-gray. Nearby ones are dark and green and detailed.
Good kits print this in, and you can push it further. Where two distant sections are nearly the same tone, resist the urge to sharpen the boundary between them. Keep the far background soft and low contrast, and save your crispest edges and strongest darks for the foreground. The picture will suddenly have depth in it.
The related rule is that warm colors advance and cool colors recede, which is the same effect described in terms of temperature. If a middle-distance area is refusing to sit back, it is usually too warm or too contrasty rather than too dark. Our guide to the basic color wheel covers the underlying idea, and softening edges covers how to do it in practice.
Practical order of work
Sky first, then distant background, then middle ground, then foreground, then the smallest details last. Working back to front means every later section is painted over or up against something already dry, and the foreground details that matter most are done while you are most careful about them rather than least.
Within that, work one color at a time across the whole canvas. On a landscape with a large sky this saves an enormous amount of brush washing.
Our landscape designs
Landscapes are the core of our catalog. All are licensed original artwork rather than stock images, in 12 x 16 framed, 16 x 20 framed and 16 x 20 unframed. Sorted honestly, because a kit that frustrates you is not a bargain:
Good first landscapes. Away From It All, Northwoods Retreat, House Near the Lake, Guiding Light and Summer's Song. Larger color areas, clear separation between shapes, and our own reviewers consistently describe them as approachable.
Middle ground. The Road Home, Cabin Fever, Moonlight Bay, Still Waters, October, Rocky Mountain Campsite, Mountain Paradise and Seaside Escape. Comfortable if you have finished a kit before.
Demanding. Mountain Village, Seaside Paradise, Golden Hour, Moonrise Song and Enchanted Woods. These are the ones reviewers describe as not for beginners, mostly for foliage density and fine tonal steps. Rewarding as a second or third kit, discouraging as a first.
One honest note on Countryside House: it is a deliberately dark, low-light palette with a great deal of black and very deep tones. Some people love it and some find it heavy going, and it is worth knowing which you are before ordering.
Famous landscapes worth looking at
Not things we sell, since we do not make reproductions of famous paintings, but useful to study if you want to understand what landscape painting is doing.
Monet's poppy fields. He painted the subject near Argenteuil in 1873, now in the Musee d'Orsay, and returned to it in the summer of 1875 with a group of four further views, one of which is in the Metropolitan Museum. Worth looking at for how little detail the distant treeline actually contains.
Van Gogh's night scenes, where a point of confusion is worth clearing up. Starry Night Over the Rhone and The Starry Night are two different paintings and they get merged constantly. The first was painted outdoors at Arles in September 1888 and hangs in the Musee d'Orsay. The second was painted from memory in the asylum at Saint-Remy in June 1889 and hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Different places, different years, different pictures. Our piece on The Starry Night covers the 1889 one.
Shishkin and Savitsky's Morning in a Pine Forest of 1889, in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Ivan Shishkin painted the forest and Konstantin Savitsky painted the bear cubs. A good study in how a dense forest is built from a limited number of tones.
Painting your own landscape
If there is a particular view that means something to you, a lake you go back to or a house you grew up in, custom paint by numbers from a photo turns your own photograph into a numbered canvas, in sizes up to 18 x 24, made in the USA.
Landscapes convert particularly well, better than portraits do, because they already have the large distinct areas of color the conversion needs. Photograph in strong side light rather than flat midday sun, and crop tight enough that there is a clear subject.
The full catalog has everything, extra paint sets cover a sky color running low, and the customer gallery shows finished landscapes from people who painted them. New to this, start with paint by numbers for beginners.
