Devotional subjects are one of the most searched categories in paint by numbers and one of the most uneven in quality. Some of it is a matter of taste, but a lot of it comes down to something structural: certain religious subjects suit a numbered canvas and certain ones fight it.
We do not make a Christian line. There is no Last Supper, no nativity and no devotional design in our catalog, so what follows is about the format rather than a route to our own shelf. If you are buying one, it should be worth painting.
Why faces are the hard part
A numbered canvas works by breaking an image into flat areas of a single color. The eye forgives that on bark, water, stone and cloth. It does not forgive it on a face.
We read faces with more precision than anything else we look at, which is why a jawline built from four flat shapes registers as wrong straight away, even to someone who could not say what is wrong. On a religious painting the face is usually the whole point, and the person receiving it may care about it a great deal. That combination is why so many Christ and Madonna kits disappoint their buyers.
The test takes ten seconds. Zoom into the face on the listing photograph. If it is built from broad, generous shapes with clear transitions, it will paint well. If it is a mosaic of tiny slivers, no amount of care at your end will save it.
Devotional subjects that suit the format
Anything where the meaning is carried by the setting rather than by a face:
- A church or chapel in a landscape. Architecture is made of flat planes and straight edges, which is exactly what numbered sections are good at.
- Crosses on a hillside, or a cross against a sky. Large simple shapes, and the sky does most of the emotional work.
- Candlelight interiors. A single warm light source in a dark room produces strong, well-separated tonal shapes.
- Scripture lettering over a scene. Lettering is the easiest thing in the world to paint by number, because the shapes are already flat by nature.
- Stained glass. The best fit of all, honestly. Stained glass is already a set of flat colored regions divided by black lines, which is what a numbered canvas is.
- A dove, a lamb, an olive branch, a fish. Simple, recognizable, and none of them depends on facial likeness.
Subjects that are genuinely difficult
Full-figure scenes with several faces are the hardest thing in this category. A Last Supper has thirteen of them, usually printed small, and a version that fits on a 16 by 20 canvas will render each face in a handful of slivers. It can be done well, but it needs a large canvas and a manufacturer who cared, and most of what is sold does not clear that bar.
Hands are the second problem, for the same reason and to a lesser degree. A hand made of five flat shapes tends to read as a glove.
A note about where the artwork came from
Almost no religious paint by numbers design is original. They are nearly all numbered versions of an existing painting, and whether that is legitimate depends on how old the original is. Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519, so The Last Supper is long out of copyright and anyone may make a kit from it. A devotional painting from the last century is a different matter, and a good deal of what circulates here is an uncredited copy.
If the listing names the original work and its painter, that is a good sign. If it names nothing at all, you are probably looking at a scan of someone's work. It is worth a thought if the kit is going to a church or a religious community.
Painting one well
A few habits that matter more on this kind of subject than on a landscape.
Work one color at a time, largest areas first. Finish everything in a given number before moving on. It is faster, and it stops you leaving stray unpainted sections in the background where they are hard to spot later.
Work from the top of the canvas down. Your hand rests on finished areas as you go, and this keeps it off the wet ones.
Do the darks before the lights, not the other way round. Pale colors in these kits are thin, and a light color will usually cover a dark one that has overrun its edge. The reverse very rarely works. If your kit's instructions tell you to start light, they are giving you a rule of thumb from oil painting that does not transfer.
Give the pale colors two coats. Yellows, creams and pale blues will not hide the printed number in one pass. That is normal and not a fault in the paint. Let the first coat dry properly rather than working the second into a wet one.
Rinse between colors, and dry the brush. Water carried on the ferrule thins the next color without you noticing. A quick press on a cloth solves it.
Do not stand brushes in the water jar. The bristles bend permanently against the bottom, and a splayed brush is useless for the fine work these subjects need. Lay them flat.
Keep the pots closed. The pot you are using can stay open; the other twenty should not. This is the single biggest cause of a kit running out of usable paint before it runs out of canvas.
If the point is meaning rather than a particular scene
Plenty of people arrive at this category wanting to give something that matters rather than a picture of a specific subject. If that is you, a custom kit made from your own photograph is usually the stronger answer — the church a family has attended for three generations, the chapel from a retreat, a christening. A building is also a far easier subject than a face.
Send a photograph you took yourself. A photograph of a painting, print, icon or holy card belongs to whoever made the original, and we cannot work from those.
Before you buy anything
The physical checks matter here more than usual, because a lot of religious kits are sold by resellers rather than by anyone who makes them: does the canvas ship rolled in a tube or folded flat, is the paint sealed, is there a full-size reference print, and can you buy replacement paint. Our guide to judging a paint by numbers kit before you buy covers each of those, and we have written separately about choosing a religious paint by numbers kit, including the two contemplative designs in our own range.
If the person you are buying for has never done one, our beginner's guide is worth sending with it.
