Most paint by number kits are a poor fit for a five-year-old, and it is worth saying that plainly before you spend money on one.
We do not make a children's range, so we have nothing to sell you here either way. What follows is the honest version.
Why standard kits do not work at five
The sections are too small. An adult kit divides the canvas into hundreds of regions, some of them a few millimetres across. Five-year-olds are still developing the fine motor control to stay inside lines that size, and asking for it produces frustration rather than practice.
The numbers are too small to read comfortably. Faint printed digits in a crowded area are hard work for adult eyes. For a child who is still learning to read numbers at all, matching them across a busy canvas is the difficult part, and it is not the enjoyable part.
They take far too long. A 16 by 20 is 10 to 20 hours of work. That is a wonderful thing for an adult and completely mismatched to the attention span of a five-year-old, who will reasonably lose interest before the picture emerges from what still looks like a tangle of lines.
The reward comes far too late. This is the real problem underneath the others. A numbered canvas looks like nothing at all until it is well over half done. Adults can hold out for that. Small children need to see the thing working now.
Hand a five-year-old an adult kit and the likely result is twenty minutes of enthusiasm, a fair amount of paint outside the lines, and an abandoned canvas. Nobody's fault.
What works better at that age
Big, bold and washable. Poster paints or washable kids' acrylics, thick brushes, large paper. The pleasure at five is in the color and the covering, not in precision.
Coloring by number rather than painting by number. The same idea with crayons or markers removes the water, the rinsing, the drying time and the mess, and leaves the matching-and-filling game, which is the part children genuinely enjoy. Far better suited to the age.
Kits actually designed for children, if you want the numbered format specifically. The ones that work have a handful of big regions rather than hundreds of small ones, thick clear numbers, and a canvas small enough to finish in a session or two. Judge by the size of the shapes in the listing photograph, not by the age on the box.
Painting alongside them. Often the best answer. A child at five is usually more interested in doing what you are doing than in completing a project of their own. You work on your canvas, they work on paper next to you, and both of you enjoy the afternoon.
When a kit starts to make sense
There is no fixed age, and it depends far more on the individual child than on a number. Broadly, somewhere around eight to ten is when the necessary things line up: enough fine motor control for smaller sections, comfortable number recognition, and the patience to work at something across several sittings without seeing the result immediately.
Even then, start with an open design with generous shapes rather than a detailed one, and expect to sit alongside them.
By the teenage years a standard adult kit is entirely reasonable, and quite a few of our own kits are bought by and for teenagers.
If you do try a kit with a young child
- Work dark to light. Dark acrylic covers light easily; light over dark needs several coats and is discouraging.
- Largest areas first, so something is visibly happening in the first ten minutes.
- Set up somewhere quiet and well lit, with the lamp to one side. Fewer distractions, better visibility.
- Cover the table and accept that some paint will end up off the canvas.
- Rinse the brush between colors, and do that part for them at first. Acrylic that dries in a brush ruins it.
- Close each pot as you go. Acrylic skins over in minutes.
- Let them stop. Split it over several short sittings and let them walk away when they have had enough. A canvas finished over four happy afternoons beats one abandoned on the first.
- Let them go off-script. If a five-year-old decides the sky should be purple, that is a better outcome than a correctly numbered canvas they resented.
Keep the expectations reasonable
One thing worth letting go of: the idea that this will teach a young child a great deal about art. At five, the value is time spent enjoyably with color and a brush, and that is plenty. Skill-building can wait, and it will come faster later if the early experience was fun rather than exacting.
Where paint by numbers actually came from
Since it is usually told wrong, and it comes up in nearly every article on this subject.
The format was developed between 1949 and 1951 by Dan Robbins, a commercial artist, working for Max S. Klein, the engineer who owned the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit. Robbins was the artist, not the company's owner, and the two roles get muddled constantly. The first kits went out under the Craft Master name in 1951. What the vintage kits were actually like is a useful check on the nostalgia.
Robbins said the idea came to him from an account of Leonardo da Vinci giving numbered patterns to apprentices. That is his stated inspiration and it is well documented. That Leonardo actually did it is not, and it should not be repeated as history.
What we make
Adult kits only. Our designs are licensed original paintings, mostly landscapes, wildlife, cabins and florals, in 12x16 and 16x20, and they are meant for someone who wants to spend ten to twenty hours on a canvas.
If you are looking for something for a child, the suggestions above will serve you better than anything in our catalog. If you are looking for something for yourself while the children are busy with their own paints, that is exactly what we are for.
