Landscapes are the most gifted category in paint by numbers, and there is a good reason for it. A landscape does not have to look like anyone. A portrait that is slightly off is uncomfortable to hang. A hillside that is slightly off is still a hillside.
That forgiveness is what makes landscape the safest thing to give someone who has never painted. This guide covers which landscape scenes are actually easy, which ones are harder than they appear, and what to check before you buy one for somebody else.
Why Landscapes Suit a Numbered Canvas
Three things, all of them practical.
Large areas share few colors. A sky, a field, a body of water. These are big restful passages where you can put music on and stop concentrating for twenty minutes. Every canvas needs some of those or it becomes work.
Nothing has to be recognizable. Nobody looks at a painted tree and says it does not resemble the tree. This removes the specific anxiety that makes people abandon pet and portrait canvases half finished.
The mistakes hide. Acrylic is opaque and dries in minutes, so a section painted with the wrong number can be painted over once it is dry. In foliage and rock, small deviations read as texture rather than error.
Which Landscapes Are Easy, and Which Are Not
Difficulty in this hobby is not about the size of the canvas. It is about how small the sections are and how narrow the color range is. A large canvas with big shapes is easier than a small one crowded with detail.
Friendlier scenes have an open sky, a clear horizon, and a few large masses. Meadows, open water, a barn in a field, a coastline. The sky alone might be a fifth of the canvas and take one evening.
Harder scenes share one or more of these traits, and none of them is obvious from a thumbnail:
- Dense foliage. A forest interior can be several hundred small sections of six similar greens. It is absorbing if you like that and grinding if you do not.
- Reflections in water. Beautiful to look at and fussy to paint, because the reflected shapes are broken up and use half the palette again.
- Snow. Snow is not white. It is a dozen pale blues, violets and grays, and telling them apart in evening lamplight is genuinely hard.
- Night and low light. A dark canvas gives you almost no visible progress for the first several hours, and the printed numbers are hardest to read exactly where the paint is darkest.
Among our own designs, the open lakeside and cabin scenes tend to suit a first-time painter, while the woodland interiors and the low-light scenes are the ones experienced painters come back for. We say so on the individual product pages rather than describing everything as easy, because a kit that defeats someone is worse than no kit at all.
Four Things to Check Before You Buy
1. How the canvas ships
Rolled in a tube, or folded into an envelope. Folded canvas arrives with creases through the image, and they do not fully come out, because the fold is in the fibers rather than on the surface. It is the most common complaint in the whole category. Ours ship rolled in a tube, and it is the thing customers mention most often without being asked.
2. Framed or unframed
An unframed canvas is a rolled sheet. It needs mounting or framing when it is finished, and that is a separate errand and a separate cost. A framed kit arrives already stretched on a wooden frame, ready to hang the day it is dry. As a gift, framed is almost always the right choice, because it removes the step most likely to leave the finished painting in a drawer.
kits worth giving this holiday sorts the catalog by who you are buying for rather than by subject.
Our framed sizes are 12x16 and 16x20 inches, and 16x20 is also available unframed. The framed kits include a small easel; the unframed one does not.
3. Whether there is a full-size reference print
The numbers printed on a canvas are small, and they are printed faintly on purpose so they disappear under the paint. A large reference image beside you is the difference between a comfortable evening and a squinting one. Our kits include an 11 by 17 inch printed reference for exactly this reason.
4. How the paint is sealed
Acrylic dries in air. Paint that has been sitting in a loose pot on a shelf can arrive thickened or skinned over. Vacuum-sealed pots avoid that. If a pot does arrive thick, a single drop of water stirred in usually brings it back, and that is worth telling whoever you are giving it to.
A Short History, Since It Comes Up
Landscape spent centuries as background. In European painting it was the setting behind the saints and the portraits, not the subject. Dutch painters in the seventeenth century were among the first to treat it as the whole point of a picture, painting flat country, weather and sky for their own sake.
It became respectable slowly. John Constable, working in England in the early nineteenth century, painted the ordinary fields near his home with the seriousness usually reserved for history painting. In the United States, Asher Brown Durand and the painters around him turned the Hudson Valley and the Catskills into a national subject.
That lineage is part of why landscape kits sell the way they do. The instinct to want a view on the wall is a long one.
If It Is a Gift
A few things worth knowing before you wrap one.
- Match the scene to the person, not to the season. Somebody who walks the coast will paint a coast. Somebody who has never mentioned mountains will not suddenly want one for twenty hours.
- Pick the easier design for a first-timer. There is no prize for difficulty and there is a real cost to a canvas someone gives up on.
- Expect it to take a while. Ten to twenty-five hours is normal, spread over a few weeks of evenings. That is a feature. It is the reason people do this instead of watching television.
- A spare paint set is a good second gift. Running out of one heavily used color near the end is a genuine frustration, and the extra paint sets are matched per design.
Our full catalog is here, and the customer gallery is the honest way to judge a design, because it shows what real people finished rather than a studio photograph. If the person you are buying for would rather paint somewhere they have actually been, a custom kit made from their own photograph is the alternative.
