There is no tram in the Ledgebay catalog. The 39 stock designs are cabins, shorelines, wildlife, gardens and winter scenes, and none of them is a streetcar or a railway. If you are here because you want a tram on a numbered canvas, the honest answer is that you will need to supply the photograph, and the useful part of this page is how to paint one once you have it.
Trams and steam locomotives are related problems but not the same problem. Locomotives are mostly black metal and soft steam, and that combination is covered in our piece on painting an old train. A tram is a different animal. It is small, brightly painted, and surrounded by a street.
The livery is the whole painting
Where a locomotive is a study in grays with two or three saturated accents, a tram is the opposite. Cream over red, green over cream, a maroon panel with a gold line: the vehicle is usually the most saturated thing on the canvas by a wide margin, and it is what the eye goes to first.
That makes the boundaries between panels the critical work. Two strong colors meeting while both are wet will bleed, and a red that has picked up green along its edge goes brown and stays brown. Paint one panel, leave it, come back when it has set properly rather than when it has stopped looking wet. Acrylic is touch-dry long before it is safe to butt a second color against.
The panel colors also want two thin coats rather than one thick one. Saturated reds and yellows are the weakest covering pigments in most sets, and one heavy coat will look solid while wet and patchy once it dries. Our note on layering acrylic paint covers the timing.
The windows are where it goes wrong
A tram is a row of identical small rectangles, and the human eye is exceptionally good at spotting when one of a repeated series is off. A window filled slightly heavier than its neighbors, or overlapped a fraction into the frame, is more noticeable than a genuine mistake somewhere else on the canvas.
Two things help. Paint the whole row in one sitting with the same amount of paint on the brush, so they dry to the same finish. And paint the window glass before the frames around it, so the frame line goes on last and tidies every edge in one pass rather than you trying to keep out of it.
Destination boards and route numbers on the front are usually printed too small to render as text. Do not fight them. Fill them as the block of color they are drawn as and let the eye supply the rest, which it will.
Overhead wires and poles
The wires, the pole and the arm reaching up to them are the thinnest elements on the canvas, and on many conversions they are barely a printed line rather than a fillable region. Paint them last, after everything around them is fully dry, using the narrow edge of a flat brush and one continuous stroke. A wire drawn in two strokes with a join in the middle looks like a wire drawn in two strokes.
If the printed line is too fine to follow, leave it. An implied wire is better than a wandering one.
Wet streets and reflections
Half the appeal of a tram scene is the reflection of the tram in a wet road, and this is the part people most often overdo. A reflection is always darker and less saturated than the thing reflecting, and it is always broken up rather than continuous.
A good conversion will have given you duller, darker numbers for the reflection, and the temptation is to think they look wrong and reach for the brighter pot instead. Trust the numbers. A reflection painted at the same strength as the tram makes the road look like a mirror rather than like wet asphalt. If you want to understand why the duller version reads as more real, the color wheel explains what happens to saturation in shadow.
Work the reflection in vertical strokes, following the direction the color would actually run down in the water. It is a small thing and it makes a large difference.
Photographing a tram for a custom canvas
Custom Paint by Numbers builds a numbered canvas from a photograph you send, which is the way to get a specific tram, in a specific city, in the livery you remember. A few things decide whether the conversion comes out well.
- Three-quarters on. A tram photographed square from the front is a rectangle. From the front corner you get the length, the row of windows and the sense of a vehicle in a street.
- Come in close. The tram should dominate the frame. A tram far down a street becomes a smudge of color once the image is divided into regions.
- Overcast, or just after rain. Flat light keeps the livery colors readable, and wet ground gives you the reflection that makes the scene.
- Watch the wires. Overhead lines photographed against a bright sky nearly disappear in conversion. If they matter to you, frame so they cross something darker, such as buildings.
- Go large. The bigger canvas gives the windows, the pole and the lettering enough room to survive as paintable shapes.
The nearest thing we do make
Beautiful Sunset in Amsterdam is the closest the catalog comes to a European street scene, though it is worth saying plainly that there is no tram in it. It is a canal: gabled brick houses, a stone bridge, a moored canal boat, a flower cart of tulips and a row of bicycles leaning on the railing, under a pink evening sky.
It poses most of the same problems a tram scene does. Repeated windows in rows, saturated colors butted against each other, thin architectural lines, and reflections in water that have to stay darker than the thing above them. If you want the practice before committing to a custom canvas of your own, it is a good place to get it.
