Buying a numbered kit from a general merchandise aisle has one real advantage over buying online: you can pick the box up. Used properly, that tells you more than any product listing will.
Here is what to check while you are standing there.
1. Feel for the tube
The most important thing, and the easiest to check in person.
A canvas folded flat into a thin box arrives with hard creases through the picture, and those creases do not come out, because the fold has cracked the primer. A canvas rolled around a cardboard tube arrives flat.
A flat, thin box almost always means a folded canvas. A box with depth to it, or one you can feel a tube inside, means a rolled one. We have written about why rolled matters, and it is the thing our own customers mention most often after having been caught out elsewhere.
2. Look at the busiest corner of the picture on the box
Not the middle. The most crowded part of the design tells you what the last third of the project will feel like.
Dense foliage, rows of windows, crowds and cobbles are where the hours go and where the tiny regions live. Sky, water and open fields go quickly. Both make good paintings; only one makes a good first kit.
3. Check whether the sample picture shows the numbers
Some packaging shows a photograph of the actual printed canvas. If it does, look at how small the numbers are relative to the regions. If the numbers are already hard to read in a marketing photograph, they will be worse on your table.
4. Check the size, and buy the bigger one
A 16x20 and a 12x16 of the same design have the same number of regions. The larger canvas spreads them over more area, so every shape and every printed number is bigger. It is the cheapest thing you can do to make a kit easier.
5. Shake it gently and listen to the paint
Rough, but it works. Sealed pots of moist acrylic are quiet and feel dense. Pots that have partly dried rattle differently, and a very light box is a warning sign.
Shelf kits are frequently a year or more old, and acrylic in an unsealed pot dries slowly in the pot. A pot that has only thickened comes back with a drop of water and a stir. One that has gone solid does not, and one dead color out of twenty-four stops the project.
6. Look for a replacement paint set
Almost nobody checks this before buying and it is the reason a great many canvases sit unfinished. You run out of the sky color at eighty percent done, there is no way to get more of that exact color, and that is the end of it.
Shelf kits generally have no replacement available. We keep a matching extra paint set for every one of our designs, which turns a dead pot into a short delay.
7. Decide about framing before you decide about price
Most in-store kits are unframed rolled canvas. That is fine, but know that these are usually trimmed close to the printed edge, which leaves too little spare material to stretch over a wooden frame afterwards. Mounting or taping to a board works; stretching generally does not.
Add the cost of framing to the price on the shelf before comparing it with anything else.
The two things the box will never tell you
How much pigment is in the paint. This is where the low end saves most of its money, and it is invisible until you are painting. Thin, under-pigmented acrylic will not cover the printed number in one coat, so every pale region needs two or three passes. That costs time and, more importantly, paint, from a set measured for one coat.
How small the smallest regions are. The photograph on the box is of the finished artwork, not of the canvas. There is no way to know from the outside whether the design has been divided sensibly, which is the single biggest difference between a pleasant kit and a frustrating one.
A correction to what this page used to say
This article previously recommended these kits for children and finished by announcing that we were in the final stages of developing a new line of paint by numbers for young children, with an invitation to sign up for it.
There is no such line, there was no such line, and we have removed it. We make kits for adults. A capable older child who has asked for one will generally do better with a proper adult kit and a design with open shapes than with anything simplified.
Where the price actually lands
A 16x20 is ten to twenty hours of painting. Across that, the gap between the cheapest kit on a shelf and a good one works out at pennies an hour, and it is the difference between an evening you look forward to and one you push through. We have gone through where the money goes in cheap paint by number kits, and the full checklist for choosing any kit is in how to choose a paint by numbers kit.
Our own designs, framed and unframed, are in the full collection.
