Running out of one color three-quarters of the way through a canvas is the most common way a paint by numbers kit ends up unfinished. It is nearly always the same culprit — a sky blue, a background green, whichever color covers the most area.
There are three ways to fix it, in descending order of how well the result will match: a matched replacement set, a store-bought acrylic mixed to match, or paint you make yourself.
Why It Happens
Kits are packed with roughly the right amount of paint for the canvas plus a margin. Two things eat the margin.
Loading the brush. Thick application uses two or three times what thin, even coverage does, and it does not look better.
Second coats on pale colors. Light paint rarely covers a printed number in one pass, so the pale pots do double duty. That is expected, and it is why the pale colors run out first.
A third, avoidable one: paint drying in an open pot. Only one pot should be open at a time.
Option 1: A Matched Extra Paint Set
The best answer, and the one that did not exist when this article was first written. We now make an Extra Paint set for every design in the catalog — 39 of them — with the same numbered colors as the original kit, mixed from the same formulas.
That matters more than it sounds. A hand-mixed match is close under your lamp and visibly off in daylight, because two paints that look identical wet can dry to different values and different sheens. A matched set removes the guesswork entirely.
Find yours by searching the design name in the catalog — for example Cabin Fever Extra Paint or Apple Harvest Extra Paint. They ship from the US, so it is a few days rather than the six to eight weeks an overseas replacement takes.
Option 2: Store-Bought Acrylic
Any craft or artist acrylic will physically work. The whole problem is matching the color.
Three things help:
- Match in daylight, not under a lamp. Artificial light will lie to you about a near-match.
- Test on scrap and let it dry. Acrylic dries darker than it looks wet, and a match judged wet will be wrong.
- Use it on the least visible area. If the match is imperfect, put the replacement paint in a corner or a background region rather than in the middle of a face or a sky.
For brand, mid-range artist acrylics such as Liquitex Basics or Arteza cover well and are inexpensive. Avoid watercolor and gouache as substitutes — both are transparent, so they will need several coats and the number will still ghost through.
Option 3: Make Your Own
Worth doing for the interest rather than the economy, and best suited to a background color where an exact match matters less.
Poster paint
Stir a quarter cup of flour into a cup of water in a pan, heat gently while stirring until it thickens, then let it cool. Divide into jars, and into each add powdered tempera and a couple of tablespoons of water. A half teaspoon of liquid starch gives a matte finish. Good for large flat areas and for painting with children.
Crayon paint
Melt old crayon stubs by color, mix a cup of flour, a cup of water and two tablespoons of salt into a paste, and stir a spoonful of the paste into each melted color. Best done in a bowl over hot water rather than a microwave. Genuinely useful for using up a jar of broken crayons.
One recipe we no longer recommend: mixing acrylic from raw dry pigment. It calls for a mask and goggles for a reason — fine pigment dust should not be handled casually at a kitchen table, and some pigments are toxic. The saving over a tube of paint is not worth it. Mixing a match from the pots you already have is the safer fallback, within limits.
Practical Tips
- Use the paint in the lid. There is often a surprising amount stuck to the inside of the lid. Use it before it dries.
- Rubbery or clay-like paint? Add one drop of water and stir with a toothpick. Repeat if needed, but go slowly — too much water and the paint stops covering.
- Mix a batch, not a dab. If you are hand-matching a color, mix half a pot's worth at once and store it in a small jar labeled with the number. Matching the same shade twice is much harder than matching it once.
- Write the recipe down. If you hit a good match, note the proportions. You will need it again.
- White underneath the pale colors. A thin coat of white first, dried, then the pale color on top. The number disappears in two coats instead of four, and you use less of the color that was going to run out.
- Dark to light. Working darkest first means a later light color can cover a slight overrun. The reverse does not work.
- Cover the outlines. Take each color slightly over the printed dividing line, or a hairline of bare canvas will show.
- Speeding up drying. A hairdryer on a low, cool setting is fine if pets or children are about. Keep a heat gun away from it — too much heat can skin the surface while the paint underneath is still wet.
- Light and a magnifier. A tabletop lamp with a magnifying lens solves the most common complaint in this hobby, which is that the numbers are too small to read comfortably.
- Take a break every hour or two. Stretch and look at something further than two feet away.
On Kit Paint Quality
It is fair to say that kit paint varies a great deal by brand, and that thick or half-dried pots are the most common complaint in the whole category. It is also fair to say what causes it: pots that are not sealed dry out on the shelf, and a kit that has sat in a warehouse for a year arrives in poor condition regardless of what was in it originally.
Ours are vacuum-sealed for that reason, which is worth checking on any kit you buy from anyone. If yours has arrived thick anyway, a drop of water is usually all it needs.
In Short
If your kit is one of ours, buy the matched Extra Paint set for the design and the color will be exact. If it is not, buy a mid-range acrylic and match it in daylight on a dried test patch. Make your own only if you want to — it is a good afternoon, but it is not the quick fix.
More on the practical side in our beginner's guide.
