There is nothing wrong with buying a cheap paint by number kit. Plenty of people finish one, enjoy it and hang it up. But the difference between a five dollar kit and a thirty dollar kit is not marketing, and it is worth knowing exactly what changes so you can decide which savings you actually mind.
Six things get cut. Some of them do not matter. Two of them ruin the evening.
1. How the canvas is packed — this is the one that matters
The cheapest way to ship a canvas is folded flat into a thin envelope. It arrives with hard creases running through the picture, and those creases do not come out. People iron them, weight them under books, tape the canvas to a board. It helps a little and it never fully works, because the fold has broken the coating on the surface.
A canvas rolled around a tube costs more to post and arrives flat. If you only check one thing before buying a budget kit, check this. We have written about rolled versus folded canvas in more detail, and it is the single most common thing our own customers mention having been caught by elsewhere.
2. Whether the paint is sealed
Acrylic in an unsealed pot dries slowly in the pot. On a kit that has been sitting in a warehouse for a year, you open the lid to a skin, or to something with the texture of putty.
Sometimes this is recoverable. A pot that has only thickened comes back with a drop of water and a good stir. A pot that has gone solid does not, and you now need a replacement for one color in a set of twenty-four before you can carry on. Vacuum-sealed pots cost the manufacturer more and are the reason ours arrive moist.
3. How much pigment is in the paint
This is the invisible one, and it is where the low end saves most of its money. Pigment is expensive; the medium it sits in is not. A thin, under-pigmented paint will not cover the printed number underneath in one coat, so every pale region needs two coats and sometimes three.
That does not just cost time. It costs paint, and a set that was measured for one coat runs out before the canvas is finished. The most common way a paint by number gets abandoned is running out of the sky color at eighty percent done.
4. How the numbers are printed
Fine, pale printing is cheaper than crisp printing, and small numbers let a manufacturer put more detail on a smaller canvas. The complaint that follows is the most common one in the whole category, ours included: the numbers are too small or too faint to read comfortably.
Two things help regardless of what you buy. Choose the larger canvas size, because the same design at 16x20 has bigger regions and bigger numbers than at 12x16. And get a lamp over your shoulder before you decide the kit is at fault.
5. The brushes
Budget kits usually include three brushes and they are usually poor: bristles that splay after an hour and never come back to a point. This one is worth the least worry, because a single decent fine brush costs very little and transforms the detail work. If you are buying cheap deliberately, plan on replacing the smallest brush and be done with it.
6. What comes with it
A printed full-size reference sheet, hanging hardware, a frame. These get dropped first. The reference sheet is the one to miss, because reading a numbered guide off a phone while you paint is genuinely miserable.
The frame is a bigger decision than it looks. An unframed canvas is cheaper, but most are trimmed close to the printed edge, which means there is not enough spare material to stretch it over a wooden frame afterwards. Taping it to a board or mounting it flat works; stretching it usually does not. Our guide to framing a finished canvas sets out what is realistic.
How to spend less without regretting it
- Buy the unframed version of a good kit rather than the framed version of a poor one. Same canvas, same paints, lower price, and you decide about framing later.
- Buy the bigger canvas. It is counterintuitive as a saving, but a 12x16 you gave up on at hour four is more expensive than a 16x20 you finished.
- Budget for one replacement brush rather than for a second kit.
- Check for a matching replacement paint set before you buy. Running out of one color is common on any kit at any price. We keep a matching extra paint set for every design, which means a dried or empty pot is an inconvenience rather than the end of the project.
What a kit is actually worth
A 16x20 is usually ten to twenty hours of painting. Set against that, the gap between the cheapest kit and a good one works out at pennies an hour, and it is the difference between an evening you look forward to and one you have to push through. If you want a sense of the commitment before you spend anything, we have looked at how long a paint by number really takes.
Our own designs, framed and unframed, are in the full collection.
