You can make a paint by number kit from your own photograph at home. People do it, and it works. It is also a bigger project than most guides admit, and the difficulty is not where you would expect.
Here is the honest version, so you can decide before you buy materials rather than halfway through.
What You Are Actually Making
Three separate things, and each one is its own job.
- A simplified image. Your photograph reduced to a small number of flat color areas, with all the gradients thrown away.
- An outline on canvas. Those flat areas drawn as shapes, each one labeled with a number.
- A set of matched paints. One premixed color per number, in enough quantity to finish, kept usable for as long as the painting takes.
Most guides spend all their time on the first step, because it is the one you can do sitting down with a laptop. The third is where home-made kits actually fall apart.
Step One: Choose the Photograph
The same rules apply as for any kit, and getting this right saves you every other problem.
- One clear subject. A face, a house, a dog, one boat. Group photos and wide landscapes reduce to hundreds of tiny sections at any size you can reasonably paint.
- Good separation between subject and background. If your dog is dark brown against a dark brown sofa, no amount of processing will pull them apart, because the information is not in the photograph.
- Even, soft light. Harsh midday sun produces blown-out whites and black shadows, and both are areas where there is nothing left to paint.
- Sharp beats large. A crisp phone photo converts better than a blurry one from a good camera.
Step Two: Reduce It to Flat Colors
The technical name for this is posterizing: collapsing a continuous range of tones into a fixed number of flat bands.
Free image editors will do it. Look for a posterize function and set it to somewhere between twelve and twenty-four levels. Fewer than twelve and the image stops being recognizable. More than twenty-four and you are mixing more paints than anyone wants to.
Then look at the result with your eyes rather than your hopes. If you cannot tell what it is at arm's length, the finished painting will not be clearer. Go back and try a different crop or a different photo rather than pushing on.
Step Three: Get the Outline Onto the Canvas
This is the tedious step. Three ways to do it, in descending order of accuracy:
A projector. Project the outlined image onto the canvas in a dark room and trace it in soft pencil. Accurate and fast, if you have or can borrow one.
Transfer paper. Print the outlines at full size, lay graphite transfer paper underneath, and trace over every line with a stylus. Reliable and slow.
The grid method. Draw a light grid on both the print and the canvas, then copy the lines square by square. It needs no equipment and it takes an evening on its own.
Whichever you use, keep the pencil light. Heavy graphite shows through pale acrylic, and you will not be able to remove it afterward.
Step Four: The Paints, and Why This Is the Hard Part
Here is what the cheerful guides leave out.
You now need to mix perhaps twenty specific colors, match each one to a numbered area, mix enough of each to cover that area with a second coat, and keep all twenty usable for the several weeks the painting will take. Acrylic dries in minutes in open air. A palette of twenty puddles is dry before you have finished mixing the last one.
The practical answer is small airtight containers, one per color, filled and sealed as you go. Even then, mixing more of a color you ran out of, three weeks later, to match a section already on the canvas, is genuinely difficult. Two mixes that look identical wet can dry noticeably apart, because acrylic darkens slightly as it dries.
This is why the home-made version usually works best on a small canvas with a deliberately limited palette. Twelve colors on a 12x16 is a pleasant weekend. Twenty-four colors on something large is a different kind of undertaking.
working large at home covers how to break that undertaking into evenings without losing your place.
Then Paint It
The same order as any kit. Background first, dark to light, foreground and highlights last, because light acrylic covers dark acrylic far more easily than the reverse. Expect a second coat on the pale colors. Our beginner's guide covers the working order and layering acrylic paint goes further.
When It Is Worth Doing, and When It Is Not
Do it yourself if the process is the point. If you like the puzzle of reducing an image, want full control over the palette, or are making something small for one person and enjoy the whole job, this is a good project.
Have it made if the painting is the point. If what you want is a few weeks of quiet evenings with a brush, spending the first two of them wrestling with transfer paper and airtight pots is the opposite of the thing you wanted.
We make custom kits from photographs, printed in the USA, in 12x16, 16x20 and 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The canvas arrives printed and rolled in a tube rather than folded, with the paints premixed and vacuum-sealed, brushes in a range of sizes and an 11 by 17 inch reference print. You can add one or two extra paint sets at checkout, which solves the running-out problem that has no good answer at home.
One thing worth saying either way: a converted photograph looks like a painting of the photo, not a copy of it. Fine detail becomes flat shape. That is what the format does, and it is why finished kits look like paintings rather than printouts.
Our guide to choosing a photo goes into more detail on what converts well, and the customer gallery shows finished custom canvases sent in by the people who painted them.
