We sell paint by numbers kits, which makes us the wrong people to give you a verdict on a competitor's. Any review we published of Paint Plot would be worth exactly what you would expect from a company reviewing a rival, and you would be right to discount it.
So this page does something more useful instead. Below is the checklist we would use ourselves to judge any paint by numbers kit before buying it, drawn from what customers actually complain about across the whole category — followed by a plain account of what we do and do not offer, including the parts that are not flattering.
Paint Plot is one of a large number of companies selling paint by numbers kits online. For an assessment of their products, go to independent review sites and to their own customer reviews rather than to us.
What to check before buying any kit
Almost every disappointment in this category traces back to one of the following, and most of them are answerable from a product page before you spend anything.
Is the canvas rolled or folded? This is the single most useful question, and the one that separates kits at every price. A folded canvas arrives with hard crease lines through the printed design, and they are very difficult to remove — pressing helps, ironing risks the print, and the lines often still show through the finished paint. A rolled canvas has none. If a listing does not say, assume folded.
How large is the printed number, and can you see it? Numbers being too small or too faint to read is the most common complaint in the whole category, ours included. It is worse on small canvases and on detailed designs. If you wear reading glasses, weight your choice toward the larger canvas of any design rather than the smaller one.
Is the paint sealed? Acrylic dries out in the pot. Kits that sit in a warehouse for months with unsealed pots arrive with paint that has thickened or skinned over. Vacuum-sealed or foil-sealed pots arrive moist.
Is there a printed reference, and how big is it? A thumbnail on the box is not much help when you are trying to work out which of three greens goes where. A large printed copy of the design is the difference between checking a section at a glance and leaning over the canvas.
What does "framed" actually mean? The word is used for at least three different things: a canvas pre-stretched on a wooden frame, a flimsy DIY frame you assemble yourself, and a canvas simply sold alongside a frame. Only the first arrives ready to hang.
Where does it ship from, and how long does it take? Many kits are drop-shipped from overseas, which is why some arrive in a week and some take a month or more. This matters most if you are buying for an occasion.
What happens when you run out of a color? One or two shades always do most of the work, and they are the ones that run low. Ask whether replacement paints exist for that design before you need them, not after.
Do the finished colors match the picture on the box? A common category complaint is that the finished piece looks flatter or more muted than the image advertised. Customer photographs are far more reliable than product photography for judging this. Look for reviews with pictures.
How to read the reviews
Three habits that work on any brand, including ours.
Read the three-star reviews first. Five-star reviews tell you the product arrived. One-star reviews are often about shipping. The middle is where people describe what the thing is actually like to use.
Look for reviews with photographs of finished work, not of the unopened box. A photograph of a completed canvas tells you about print quality, color accuracy and how the design reads at a distance, all at once.
Treat difficulty claims as design-specific, not brand-specific. Within any single brand, one design will be genuinely easy and another genuinely hard, and reviewers describing opposite experiences are usually both right — they are talking about different pictures. Judge the design, not the label on the box.
What we offer, and what we do not
Since we have asked you to be skeptical of us, here is the same information about our own kits.
What we do: 39 licensed designs from artists including Judy Buswell, Kim Norlien, the Hautman Brothers, Abraham Hunter, Collin Bogle, Terry Doughty and Derk Hansen, whose work you can browse on our artists page. We license the original artwork rather than adapting a stock image. Canvases are pre-printed cotton, shipped rolled in a tube, never folded. Paints are acrylic and vacuum-sealed. There is an 11 x 17 printout of the design in every kit, and a matching replacement paint set for every design. There is also a custom option made from your own photo, printed and shipped in the USA.
What we do not:
- No abstract designs, no portrait line, no reproductions of famous paintings, and no children's range. Our catalog is representational — landscapes, wildlife, cabins, florals, seasonal scenes.
- Three sizes only on the licensed designs: 12 x 16 framed, 16 x 20 framed, 16 x 20 unframed. Custom canvases go to 18 x 24, and that is our largest.
- The easel comes with framed sizes only. Not with unframed.
- The unframed canvas is trimmed close to the printed edge, so it suits mounting or taping to a board. There is not enough margin to stretch it over your own stretcher bars.
- Some of our designs are genuinely demanding. Orchard Puzzle, Seaside Paradise, Mountain Village and Enchanted Woods have many small sections. They are not first canvases, and we would rather say so than sell you the wrong one.
- A few customers find the kit brushes too coarse for the very finest sections. One inexpensive fine round from an art store solves it.
- The finest numbers are small. Good light from the side and, for some designs, a magnifier.
None of that is unusual for the category. It is just the part most product pages leave out.
Choosing well
The best predictor of whether you will finish a canvas is not the brand at all. It is whether you actually want to look at that picture for the next ten to twenty hours, and whether the difficulty matches your patience on an ordinary evening.
Pick the image first. Then check the canvas is rolled, the paints are sealed, and the numbers will be readable at that size. Everything else is detail.
If you want to see what we make, the full collection is here, and the customer gallery is finished work photographed by the people who painted it — which, as above, is the evidence worth trusting.
