Paris is one of the most painted cities in the world, and paint by numbers kits of it are easy to find. This is a guide to what separates a good one from a frustrating one, written by people who make these kits but do not currently make a Paris design.
That last part is worth saying at the top. Our catalog is licensed American artwork, mostly cabins, wildlife, coastlines and florals. If a Paris canvas is what you want, you will be buying it elsewhere, and you may as well buy a good one. There is one route through us at the end of this, and it involves your own photograph rather than ours.
Why Paris Paints Well
Some subjects fight a numbered canvas and some suit it. Paris suits it, for reasons that are worth understanding before you choose a design.
The stone is one color. Central Paris is built largely from a pale limestone, so a whole street front sits in a narrow band of cream, gray and warm buff. That means large areas of a Paris canvas share very few numbers, and large areas are the restful part of painting.
The verticals do the composition for you. A single tall landmark against a horizontal city is a composition that works from almost any angle. It is why so many Paris paintings look competent even when they are not especially skilled.
Wet streets give you a free second painting. Reflections repeat the colors above them in softer, darker versions. On a numbered canvas this shows up as a set of shapes that use the same paints you have already opened.
What to Check Before You Buy Any Paris Kit
These four things decide whether a kit is a pleasant month of evenings or a canvas that ends up in a cupboard. They apply to any seller.
How the canvas is shipped
Rolled in a tube, or folded flat in an envelope. Folded canvas arrives with creases across the image and they are difficult to remove completely, because the crease is in the fibers rather than on the surface. This is the single most common complaint in the category and the single easiest thing to check before you order. If a listing does not say, ask.
How dark the design is
Night scenes are everywhere in Paris artwork, and they are harder than they look. A canvas that is three quarters dark blue and black gives you very little visual progress for the first several hours, and the printed numbers underneath are hardest to read in exactly those sections. A daytime or dusk scene is a friendlier first Paris canvas.
How many tiny sections there are
Look closely at the pictured design for crowds of small figures, rows of windows, and lettering on cafe awnings. Each of those is a cluster of sections a few millimeters across. Some painters enjoy that and some find it exhausting. Neither is wrong, but it is worth knowing which you are before you buy.
Whether there is a full-size reference
A printed reference image you can put beside you matters more than any other extra. The numbers on the canvas are small. A large-format printout is the difference between a comfortable evening and a squinting one, and plenty of kits ship with nothing bigger than the box lid.
Working Order for a City Scene
City subjects reward a slightly different approach from landscapes.
- Sky first, and all of it. It is the largest single area and it sets the value of everything else. Finishing it early also gives you an immediate sense of progress.
- Then the building masses, dark to light. Lay in the shadowed sides before the sunlit ones. Light acrylic covers dark acrylic far more easily than the reverse, so this order saves you second coats.
- Windows, railings and figures last. These are the small, fiddly sections. Do them when the paint around them is fully dry, with a fine brush and a lamp, and stop for the night before you get tired rather than after.
- Expect a second coat on the pale colors. Creams and off-whites over a printed number usually need two passes. That is normal and not a fault in the paint.
Our guide to layering acrylic paint covers the thin-to-thick order in more detail, and the beginner's guide covers the rest.
The Better Version: Your Own Photograph
Here is the honest recommendation. A generic Eiffel Tower canvas is a picture anyone could own. A canvas made from the photograph you actually took, from the corner you actually stood on, is not.
We turn photographs into numbered kits, printed in the USA, in 12x16, 16x20 and 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. You can add one or two extra paint sets at checkout if you would rather not run short on a heavily used color.
A few things make a Paris photograph work well as a source image:
- Pick one subject, not a panorama. A single cafe front, one bridge, one street corner. Wide cityscapes reduce to a lot of very small numbered sections at any size.
- Daylight or early evening beats full dark. Same reason as above. Detail in shadow is where photographs and numbered canvases both lose information.
- Sharp beats large. A crisp photo from a phone converts better than a blurry one from a good camera.
- It will look like a painting of your photo, not a copy of it. Fine detail gets simplified into flat shapes. That is what the format does, and it is why finished kits look like paintings.
You can start one on the custom paint by numbers page, and our guide to choosing a photo goes into more detail about what converts well.
If You Would Rather Paint Something We Make
Our own designs are landscapes and wildlife rather than cityscapes, and several of them ask similar things of a painter: large restful skies, water with reflections, and a few demanding passages of detail. The full catalog is here, and the customer gallery shows finished canvases sent in by the people who painted them, which is a better guide to difficulty than any description we could write.
