We should start with the thing you came here to find out. We do not make a religious line. There is no Last Supper, no nativity and no devotional design anywhere in our catalog, and pointing you at one of ours would waste your time.
What we can do is tell you how this particular corner of the category works, because religious kits have two problems the rest of the market does not, and both of them are worth knowing about before you order.
Problem one: most religious kits are copies of paintings
Very few religious paint by numbers designs are original artwork. Almost all of them are numbered versions of an existing painting — most often The Last Supper, a Sacred Heart, a nativity or a Madonna.
Whether that is legitimate depends entirely 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 twentieth century is a different matter, and a good deal of what circulates in this category is a copy of a copy of somebody's work with no attribution anywhere on the box.
It is worth a moment's thought if you are giving it as a gift, particularly to a church or a religious community. If the listing names the original painting and its painter, that is a good sign. If it names nothing at all, you are probably looking at a scan.
Problem two: faces are the hardest subject in this whole format
This is the practical one, and it is the reason so many religious kits disappoint.
Paint by numbers works by breaking a picture into flat regions of a single color each. That is forgiving on trees, water, snow and stone, where the eye accepts a slightly wrong edge without complaint. It is unforgiving on a human face. We recognize faces with far more precision than we recognize anything else, and a jawline made of four flat shapes reads as wrong immediately even to someone who cannot say why.
On a religious painting this matters more than usual, because the face is normally the point of the picture and because the recipient may care about it a great deal. A kit with a small, densely subdivided face will look either strange or muddy, and no amount of care at your end changes that.
If you are set on a religious design with a figure in it, zoom into the face on the product photo before you buy. You want to see broad, generous shapes with clear transitions. If the face is a mosaic of tiny slivers, choose something else. Landscapes with a chapel, crosses on a hillside, candlelit interiors and scriptural quotations over a scene all avoid the problem entirely and finish far better.
Landscapes are the easiest subject to succeed with, for practical reasons rather than aesthetic ones, and choosing a landscape kit explains which ones fill quickly and which will slow you down.
How to judge the kit itself
Beyond the subject, the physical checks are the same as for any other kit, and they matter more here because a lot of religious designs are sold by sellers who bought a job lot rather than by anyone who makes them. In short: does the canvas ship rolled in a tube or folded flat, is the paint sealed, is there a full-size reference print rather than a thumbnail, and can you buy replacement paint if a color runs out. Our guide to judging a paint by numbers kit before you buy goes through each of those in detail.
We are not going to name a brand of religious kit. We have not painted them, and a recommendation we cannot stand behind is worth nothing to you.
The route we would actually suggest
If the point is to give something meaningful rather than to own a picture of a particular scene, a custom kit made from your own photograph is usually the better answer. The photographs people send for this tend to be the church they were married in, the chapel from a retreat, a christening, or the building a family has attended for three generations. Those carry more than a stock devotional image does, and a building is a far easier subject than a face.
One caution, and it follows directly from the copyright point above: send a photograph you took yourself. A photograph of a painting, a print, a holy card or an icon belongs to whoever made the original, and we are not able to work from those.
Photograph the building on an overcast day or in the hour before sunset rather than at midday. Flat noon light gives a flat painting; angled light gives you the shadows that make stonework read as stone.
The quiet alternative
There is a third option that people often land on and are happier with: a contemplative subject rather than an explicitly religious one. Something calm to look at, that does not announce itself, and that suits a room where somebody sits and thinks.
Be Still by Abraham Hunter is an empty white chair on the sand at sunset. We do not sell it as a religious painting, and the artist did not paint it as one as far as we know, but the title carries an obvious echo for anyone who knows the psalm and a good number of people buy it for that reason. It is also a genuinely easy first canvas: large simple areas of sand and sky, one clean object, nothing fiddly.
Mountain Village, also by Abraham Hunter, is a stone bridge and a church spire in a village below mountains. It is a good deal harder — the stonework and the massed trees carry a lot of small sections — but the spire gives it the note people are usually looking for.
If you are giving it
Two things make the difference between a gift that gets finished and one that gets shelved. Choose the smaller size unless you know the person paints regularly, because a 12 by 16 finished beats a 16 by 20 abandoned at the halfway mark. And choose framed rather than unframed, so it is rigid to work on and ready to hang the moment it is done rather than needing a second project to mount it.
If the person has never done one before, our beginner's guide to paint by numbers is a reasonable thing to send along with it. We have also written more specifically about the Christian paint by numbers corner of the market, and everything we do make is in the full collection.
