In a paint by numbers kit you do not choose the colors. They arrive premixed, matched to one design, and the whole appeal of the format is that somebody else made those decisions for you.
But you do choose the palette, once, when you choose the design. That decision determines how the finished painting looks on your wall and how the evenings in between actually go. It is worth making it deliberately rather than by picture alone.
What the Numbers Really Encode
A kit's palette is not a set of pretty colors. It is a map of light and dark.
What makes a finished canvas read as a tree or a face or a wave is not the particular greens and browns. It is that some sections are darker than the ones beside them, in exactly the right places. Color sits on top of that structure and gives it a mood.
This is why a palette with twenty colors is not necessarily harder than one with twelve. What matters is how close together those colors are.
Count the Near-Identical Colors
This is the most useful thing you can do before buying, and almost nobody does it.
Look at the design and ask how many colors in it are near neighbors. A forest interior might use eight greens separated by very little. A snow scene might use ten pale blues, violets and grays that are genuinely hard to tell apart in a pot under a lamp.
Those are the designs where you will be checking the number twice on every section. Some people find that absorbing and it is exactly why they paint. Others find it the point at which a canvas goes back in the box.
A design with a broad spread instead, a blue sky, green grass, a red barn, warm wood, one dark shadow, is a much easier evening. There is no prize for difficulty and no shame in wanting a restful one.
Warm or Cool, and Where It Will Hang
Palettes divide roughly into warm and cool, and the difference carries across a room.
Warm palettes run through reds, oranges, golds and warm browns. Sunsets, autumn, lamplit windows, harvest scenes. They read as close and comfortable, and they hold up in a room with warm light and wooden furniture.
Cool palettes run through blues, greens and grays. Snow, dusk, open water, misty woodland. They read as calm and give a sense of distance, and they suit a room with plenty of daylight.
Most designs are mostly one with a little of the other, and that little is usually the point of the painting. The lit window in a snow scene is warm precisely because everything around it is cold. If you look at a design and cannot see where that accent is, you are probably looking at a flat one.
Dark Palettes Are Harder Than They Look
Worth saying plainly, because it catches people out repeatedly.
Night scenes, storm scenes and dense woodland look striking in a thumbnail. In practice they give you very little visible progress for the first several hours, because the canvas goes from white to dark and then stays dark for a long time. And the printed numbers are hardest to read exactly where the paint is darkest.
A daylight or dusk scene with a good range from light to dark is a kinder canvas, and it will hang just as well.
Why You Cannot Substitute a Color
The paints in a kit are custom mixes made for one design. The number on the pot refers to that design's chart and nothing else. There is no standard name and nothing to look up, so a tube from the craft store will not match, and even where it looks close when wet, acrylic darkens slightly as it dries.
If a pot runs low, a set matched to your own design is the only reliable answer. We cover that in replacement paint, and the matched sets are in the extra paint collection.
If You Do Want to Change the Palette
You can, and plenty of people do. The one rule is that a substituted color has to be the same lightness as the one it replaces, because the lightness is what the picture is built on. Swap a mid green for a mid blue and the painting still reads. Swap the same green for a pale cream and the shape it was describing collapses.
Our guide to personalizing a canvas covers how to do that without wrecking it, and the color wheel guide covers which pairs sit badly together.
A Practical Way to Decide
Squint at the design image until the detail collapses and only light and dark patches remain. If it still reads clearly at that point, the design has good structure and will look right on a wall from across the room. If it goes to mush, it is a design that depends on close detail, and it will ask more of you.
If a design does ask more of you, the light setup matters more than anything else you can change, and it is the cheapest fix available.
Then decide whether you want the demanding one or the restful one. Both are good answers on different weeks.
Our own designs are licensed original artwork, and we try to say on each product page what is genuinely harder about it rather than describing everything as easy. The catalog is here, and the customer gallery shows finished canvases, which is the most honest preview of a palette there is.
