Craft Master is not a current brand. It was the name Palmer Paint put on the first paint by number kits in 1951, and it is the reason the whole format exists. If you have found the name on a box in a relative's attic, or seen it on a listing somewhere, here is what you actually have.
Where the name comes from
In 1949, Dan Robbins was working as a package designer at the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit, a small firm run by Max Klein. Klein wanted a way to sell more paint to ordinary households, and Robbins was given the problem.
He had heard that Leonardo da Vinci gave his apprentices numbered background patterns to work from, and built a product around the idea. His method: paint an original picture, lay a transparent overlay on top of it, trace out the boundary of each block of color, and number each shape to match a pot of paint.
Retailers were not interested. The concept was hard to explain on a shelf and nobody wanted the stock risk. The break came in November 1950, when Klein persuaded the Macy's toy buyer to let Palmer Paint demonstrate the kits during the New York Toy Show, with Macy's paying only for the sets that actually sold. Watching somebody fill in a numbered section explains the product in about ten seconds, where a written description does not.
Palmer Paint began selling under the Craft Master name in 1951, packaged with the slogan "every man a Rembrandt."
How big it got
By 1954 more than twelve million kits had sold. Craft Master sales peaked at twenty million in 1955.
For a novelty craft product in a country of roughly 165 million people, that is an extraordinary number, and it is why finished Craft Master canvases are still turning up on the walls of American houses seventy years later. In 2001 the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History devoted an exhibition to the phenomenon, Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s, and holds a research collection of the kits.
What an original Craft Master kit was like
Different from a modern kit in several ways worth knowing if you are looking at one.
- Oil paints, not acrylic. Slow-drying, which meant days between coats rather than minutes, and a smell that is part of what people remember.
- Board more often than canvas. Rigid, pre-cut, and prone to warping in a damp attic.
- Coarser sections. The printing of the period could not hold the fine shapes a modern press can. A 1950s canvas has larger, simpler areas than a contemporary detailed design, which makes vintage kits easier to paint and cruder to look at.
- Paired designs. Kits were frequently sold as matching pairs meant to hang either side of something.
- No large reference print. A small picture on the box lid was all you got.
If you have found one
An unopened kit is the collectible version. Condition is everything, and the paint is the problem: oil paint in seventy-year-old pots has usually set solid. A sealed box is valued as an object rather than as something to paint.
A finished period painting is worth keeping regardless of what it fetches. These are genuine artifacts of the decade, and the subjects that people chose then, big-eyed animals, matadors, harbor scenes, tell you something. Do not clean one with anything wet; dust it dry and leave it alone.
On value: check completed sales rather than asking prices, because asking prices on vintage anything are aspirational. Subject and condition drive the number far more than the brand does.
What replaced it
The format did not go away, it improved. A modern kit differs from a Craft Master in four practical ways.
- Acrylic instead of oil. Water-based, low-odor, dry in minutes, and it can be corrected by painting over a mistake once it has dried.
- Cotton canvas instead of board. Better kits ship it rolled in a tube rather than folded, so it arrives without creases pressed through the print.
- Vacuum-sealed paint. The single biggest improvement. Old pots dried out in the warehouse; sealed ones arrive moist.
- A large reference print. Ledgebay kits include an 11x17 printout, which matters once the numbers in the smallest sections get hard to read.
What has not changed is the idea. A printed surface divided into numbered shapes, paints matched to those numbers, and a picture that appears as you fill them in. Anyone who painted a Craft Master kit in 1955 would sit down to a modern one and know exactly what to do.
Common questions
Can I still buy Craft Master kits?
Not new. Original kits come up on secondhand marketplaces and at estate sales. What Ledgebay makes is not a Craft Master kit and is not a reproduction of one: the catalog is 39 designs licensed from working painters.
Can I paint a vintage kit that I found?
You can paint the board or canvas, but expect the original oil paints to be unusable. Modern acrylics will cover the printed numbers perfectly well; matching the intended colors by eye is the harder part. Bear in mind that painting a sealed kit destroys most of whatever collectible value it had.
Are old paint by number pictures worth anything?
Some are, mostly as period decoration rather than as art. Condition, subject and whether the board has warped matter more than the maker's name.
Who actually invented paint by number?
Dan Robbins, in 1949, at Palmer Paint under Max Klein. There is a fuller account in a short history of paint by numbers, including which parts of the popular version are documented and which are not.
What should I buy if I want the modern equivalent?
Something with large, clearly separated areas if it is your first. The beginner guide covers what makes a design easy or hard, and the customer gallery shows finished canvases.
