Ledgebay does not make celebrity paint by numbers kits. They are easy enough to find elsewhere, and it is worth understanding what you are buying before you do. Most are printed from photographs the seller never licensed, faces rarely paint up well from an unprepared image, and the kit often cannot be replaced once it sells out. If what you want is a face you love on the wall, there is a more reliable route, and it starts with a photo you already own.
buying a kit in a store covers what to check on the shelf, where you cannot read a review first.
What a celebrity kit actually is
The mechanics are the same as any paint by number. A canvas arrives printed with outlined shapes, each shape carrying a number, and each number matching a pot of paint. You fill the shapes in, the outlines disappear under the paint, and the picture resolves. A famous face changes none of that.
What it does change is the source image. A landscape kit is usually drawn from artwork the seller commissioned or licensed. A celebrity kit is nearly always traced from a press or red-carpet photograph found online. That has two practical consequences.
The licensing problem
A photograph belongs to the photographer who took it, not to the person in the frame, and selling a product made from it normally requires permission. Sellers of celebrity kits rarely have it. That is why listings appear and vanish from marketplaces, why the same portrait is available one month and gone the next, and why a replacement pot of paint or a second copy is often impossible to get.
The second consequence is how it paints. A photograph that was never prepared for a paint by number has not had its tones separated into clean, paintable steps. Skin is the hardest thing to get right this way. Areas that should shade gently into one another arrive as flat patches, and the finished face reads as close but not quite right. That is the usual reason portrait kits disappoint, whoever the subject is.
Where the format came from
Paint by number was conceived in 1949 by Dan Robbins, a commercial artist at the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit, working with the company president, Max Klein. Robbins said his starting point was an account of Leonardo da Vinci handing numbered patterns to his apprentices. The kits reached the public in the early 1950s under the slogan "every man a Rembrandt." Critics were scathing. They sold in the millions anyway. Robbins died in 2019, aged 93.
The idea was never celebrity. It was to give someone with no training a real evening at an easel and something to show for it afterward. That is still the strongest reason to sit down with one.
A portrait that is genuinely yours
If the appeal of a celebrity kit is painting a person rather than a landscape, a custom kit made from your own photo does the same job and keeps the result personal. People send the dog that is no longer around, a grandparent on their wedding day, the house they grew up in, a child caught on an ordinary afternoon. The canvas and paints are prepared from that image and printed in the USA rather than drop-shipped from overseas.
Custom canvases come in 12x16, 16x20 and 18x24, framed or unframed, and you can add one or two extra paint sets at checkout if you expect to lean hard on a single color. The customer gallery shows finished ones, which is the most honest preview there is.
Choosing a photo that works
- Use a photo you took, or one you have permission to use. The same principle as above, pointed in your own direction.
- One or two faces, filling the frame. Group shots lose detail quickly. With three or more people, choose the largest size.
- Even, soft light. A hard shadow across a face becomes a hard-edged dark shape once it is painted flat.
- Sharp at full size. Zoom right in on the face before you send it. Soft on screen means soft on canvas.
- Expect a painting, not a photocopy. Features are simplified into paintable shapes. That is the format working as intended, not a fault.
What arrives in the box
The canvas ships rolled in a tube rather than folded, so it arrives without creases pressed through the print. Acrylic paints are vacuum-sealed, so they have not dried out in transit. Brushes come in a range of sizes. There is an 11x17 reference print, which matters more than people expect once the numbers in the smallest sections get hard to read. Framed sizes include a wooden easel; unframed sizes do not.
If you would rather paint something other than a face
The Ledgebay catalog is 39 licensed designs, all representational: cabins, wildlife, birds, florals, Americana scenes. There is no celebrity line, no abstract line and no reproduction of famous paintings. If this would be your first kit, the beginner guide is a better place to start than a portrait. Faces are among the harder things to paint by number, custom or not.
Common questions
Can I have a custom kit made from a photo of a celebrity?
No. Send a photo you took yourself or otherwise have the right to use.
Is a celebrity kit bought elsewhere a problem to own?
Buying one and painting it is not the issue. The exposure sits with whoever printed and sold it. The practical risk to you is simply that the product disappears and cannot be replaced.
How long does a portrait canvas take?
Plan on a few weeks of evenings rather than a weekend. Faces go slower than landscapes because the sections are smaller and there are more of them.
Will the printed numbers show through the paint?
Dark colors cover in a single coat. A light color laid over a dark printed number sometimes needs a second thin coat once the first has dried.
What if I run out of one color?
Stock designs each have a matching set in the extra paint collection. For a custom canvas, add the spare sets at checkout rather than afterward, since the paints are mixed for your specific image.
