There is no Paris design in the Ledgebay catalog, so if you want Paris on a numbered canvas the route is a custom kit made from your own photograph. For most people that is the better outcome anyway, because the Paris worth painting is usually the one you actually stood in. The Paris designs available as kits are a small set, and worth comparing before you commit.
Your own photograph, converted
A custom paint by numbers kit takes a photograph you upload and returns it as a printed canvas with every section outlined and numbered, plus a set of paints matched to it. Sizes are 12x16, 16x20 and 18x24, framed or unframed, and it is printed in the USA rather than drop-shipped from overseas.
Paris photographs are a common request and they fall into two groups that behave very differently.
Wide city views — the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadéro, a rooftop panorama, the Seine with bridges receding. These are the ones people reach for and the ones that convert least well. Everything in them is small, the light is usually flat, and a great deal of the frame is sky. Crop hard if you use one, and take the 18x24.
One thing, close — a café front with its awning and rattan chairs, a green Wallace fountain, a bakery window, a single street corner in late light. These convert beautifully. There is one clear subject, the color is strong, and the shapes are big enough to become satisfying sections to paint.
If you are choosing between two photographs from the same trip, pick the closer one.
What makes a Paris scene hard to paint
Worth knowing before you commit twenty hours to it.
- Straight lines and perspective. Haussmann buildings are all repeated verticals and receding rooflines, and the eye notices immediately when one is off. A numbered canvas removes this problem entirely, which is the strongest argument for going that route with architecture.
- The Eiffel Tower is a lattice. Painted honestly it is hundreds of tiny crossing members, which on a small canvas becomes an unreadable tangle. At distance it works better as a silhouette shape than as detail. If your photo has it small in the frame, that is fine. If it fills the frame, go large.
- Wet cobbles. The reason wet street photographs look so good is reflection, and reflections are demanding: the painting has to keep the reflected values darker and softer than the things they reflect, or the street looks like a mirror.
- Night scenes. A lit café at night is a lovely photograph and a difficult painting, because almost the whole image sits in a narrow dark band and the shapes stop separating from each other.
The European street scene that does exist
If what you want is the feeling rather than the specific city, Beautiful Sunset in Amsterdam is the closest thing in the range: narrow canal houses in warm brick and green, bicycles leaning along the water, flowers in the window boxes. It carries the same appeal as a Paris street scene, and it is a real design you can buy today rather than a thing we do not make.
It is one of the busier designs, with a lot of small windows and shutters, so take the 16x20 if you can.
What comes in a kit
- Pre-printed cotton canvas, rolled in a tube rather than folded, so there are no creases to flatten out
- Acrylic paints, vacuum-sealed so they arrive moist rather than dried
- Brushes in a range of sizes
- Printed instructions and an 11x17 printout of the design
- Framed sizes also include a wooden tabletop easel
Framed canvases arrive pre-stretched on a wooden frame and are ready to hang the moment the last section is dry. Unframed costs less and is trimmed close to the printed edge, so it suits mounting to a board rather than stretching over your own bars.
One correction
An earlier version of this article cited a study in Frontiers in Psychology finding that people who completed a paint by numbers kit were happier and more satisfied with their lives. No such study exists and the citation has been removed. What can be said honestly is what customers say themselves: it is absorbing, it fills an evening that would otherwise have gone on a screen, and there is something at the end of it. That is enough of a case without inventing research.
Getting started
If this would be your first numbered canvas, the beginner's guide covers how the sections and paints work. Turning a photo into a paint by numbers canvas goes deeper on what makes a photograph convert well, and finished pieces from other customers are in the customer gallery.
