Tigers are one of the most requested subjects in paint by numbers and one of the least forgiving. The thing that makes a tiger worth painting — the stripes — is exactly the thing a numbered canvas finds hardest, and it is worth understanding why before you start rather than halfway through.
Bamboo Tiger
We have one big cat: Bamboo Tiger, a tiger's face framed by bamboo leaves. It is a striking canvas and it is genuinely demanding, so we would rather set expectations properly than sell it to someone on their first evening.
Two things make it hard. The stripes are many long, narrow sections that have to stay clean, and a wandering edge shows immediately on a stripe in a way it never does on a tree. Behind the tiger, the bamboo is a mass of overlapping leaves, each one its own small shape with its own edge.
What makes it worth the effort is that the design has real structure underneath the pattern. The face is built from broad tonal masses with the stripes laid over the top, which is the right way round and is why the finished canvas reads as a solid head rather than a flat pattern.
Why stripes are hard on a numbered canvas
A numbered canvas works by dividing an image into flat regions of one color. That suits areas. A stripe is closer to a line — long, thin, curving, and with an edge along its whole length rather than at a couple of corners.
Two consequences follow. Thin sections are difficult to fill without going over, because the brush has nowhere to sit inside the shape. And any wobble is visible, because it runs alongside a straight-ish neighbor that shows it up.
There is a third, subtler issue. Stripes wrap around a curved head, so on the sides of the face they compress and narrow. Painting them all at the same weight flattens the tiger into a cardboard cut-out. The design already accounts for it — the sections are printed narrower where they turn away — so the instruction is simply to paint what is printed rather than what you think a stripe should look like.
How to paint them cleanly
Do the base fur first, and let it dry. All the broad orange and cream areas, completely finished and dry, before any stripe goes on. A dark stripe laid over dry paint is far easier than a stripe squeezed between two wet neighbors.
Use the side of the brush, not the point. Pressed lightly on its side, a round brush makes a longer, straighter contact with the canvas than the tip does, and it follows a curve much more accurately. A liner brush — long thin bristles — holds enough paint for a whole stripe in one stroke, and it is the single best few dollars you can spend if you paint animals.
Pull toward yourself, and turn the canvas. Your hand draws a comfortable arc in one direction and an awkward one in the other. Rotate the canvas so each stripe runs the comfortable way. This is the habit that separates clean work from careful work.
Rest your little finger on the canvas. Or on a card laid over a dry area. An unsupported hand wobbles no matter how steady you are.
Follow the direction of the coat. Let your strokes run the way the fur grows rather than across it. Nobody consciously notices, and everybody notices when it is wrong.
Rinse properly between the darks, and dry the brush. On an animal the whole illusion depends on small differences between one dark and another. Two darks that have contaminated each other become one dark and the form collapses. Water carried in the ferrule thins the next color without you seeing it happen.
Leave the eyes until last, when you are fresh. Usually two or three tiny sections including a white catchlight. That catchlight is what makes the animal alive rather than stuffed, and it should not be blended or enlarged. Do not do it at the end of a three-hour session.
If a stripe goes wrong
While it is wet, do not wipe — wiping spreads it. Take a clean damp brush, pressed out, and lift the stray paint by touching and drawing away.
Once it is dry, wait until it is dry all the way through, then repair with the correct neighboring color rather than with white. Acrylic is opaque enough to cover itself, so a stripe that has spread can be trimmed back by painting the fur color up against where the edge should be. Do not use rubbing alcohol or any solvent on the painting — acrylic dissolves in both, and you will take the surrounding work with it.
Our note on getting clean lines on a numbered canvas covers the technique in more detail.
If you want something easier with an animal in it
Birds are the forgiving end of this category, because feathers group into plates with real edges rather than dissolving the way fur does. Rural Route Bluebirds and Hummingbird are both good first canvases.
Or choose a design where the animal is part of a landscape rather than the whole subject — Northwoods Retreat has a bull moose in a lake below a cabin, and most of the canvas is water, trees and sky. Our guide to which animal canvas to start with ranks them properly, and the animals collection has the rest.
A note on tiger symbolism
Since it comes up: the white tiger is one of the Four Symbols of the traditional Chinese constellations, the guardian of the west, and the figure travelled into Japanese and Korean tradition from there. That much is well documented and it is a genuinely old association.
What we are not going to do is repeat the lists of invented meanings that circulate under this heading, including the ones attributing tiger symbolism to Native American traditions. Tigers are not native to the Americas. If a symbol matters to you, it is worth looking up properly rather than taking it from a shop's blog, including ours.
What is actually in the kit
Worth correcting a version of this page that listed metal pins and frames as standard contents. A kit contains a pre-printed canvas, numbered pots of acrylic paint matched to the design, brushes in a range of sizes, and an 11 by 17 reference print. Framed kits arrive stretched on a wooden frame and include an easel; unframed kits are a loose canvas. There are no pins.
One other correction: the paints are acrylic, not watercolor. Adding water thins acrylic and reduces its coverage — it does not turn it into watercolor, and past a certain point it breaks down the paint film and the canvas shows through. A drop stirred into a stiffening pot is fine; a wet brush is not a technique.
Our breakdown of what is in a paint by numbers kit goes through every part, and everything we make is in the full collection.
