Two things to say straight away, because they are what you came to find out.
We do not make a figure or portrait design. There is no woman, no dancer, no classical nude and no fashion illustration in our catalog. Our range is landscape, wildlife, coastline and floral, and pointing you at one of those would be no answer at all.
And portraits are the single hardest subject in this format. That is not a matter of taste — it is structural, and it is worth understanding before you buy one from anyone, because it explains most of the disappointed reviews in this corner of the market.
Why faces are the hard part
A numbered canvas breaks an image into flat regions of one color each. On bark, stone, water and cloth that works beautifully; the eye accepts a slightly imperfect edge without noticing.
Faces are different, and the difference is in us rather than in the paint. Human beings recognize faces with far more precision than we recognize anything else, and we are exquisitely sensitive to small errors in them. A jawline built from four flat shapes registers as wrong immediately, even to someone who could not say what is wrong. Shift a numbered section by a couple of millimeters on a tree and nothing happens. Shift it on an eyelid and the expression changes.
Skin makes it worse. Skin is a continuous gradient with no edges anywhere in it, and it carries subtle color shifts — cooler at the temples, warmer at the cheeks, redder around the nose and ears. Cutting that into flat regions is the least natural thing you can ask a numbered design to do.
How to judge a portrait kit before buying
The test takes ten seconds and it is reliable.
Zoom into the face on the product photo. You want to see broad, generous shapes — a large area for the lit side, a large area for the shaded side, a handful of features. That will paint well and read properly from across a room, which is where a painting is actually seen.
If instead the face is a mosaic of tiny slivers, put it back. A finely subdivided face is slow, unforgiving, and tends to end up looking either muddy or scratchy no matter how carefully it is painted. Detail in the face is not a sign of quality here — it is a warning.
Two other things to look for. Check whether the face is a reasonable size on the canvas: a head that occupies a small part of a 16 by 20 will have features rendered in sections a millimeter across. And check the hands if there are any, for the same reason at a lesser degree. A hand made of five flat shapes reads as a glove.
Figure designs that avoid the problem
There is a whole category of figure painting that works well on a numbered canvas, and it is the one to look for: figures where you cannot see the face.
A woman seen from behind. A figure walking away along a beach. Someone at a window in silhouette, or under a parasol, or in profile at a distance. In each case the picture is carried by the pose, the light and the setting rather than by facial likeness, and the format handles all three well. The Lady of Shalott is the best-known case of a figure carried entirely by setting and light.
The same is true of hair, fabric and background, which are genuinely enjoyable to paint. A dress in strong light has broad, clear tonal shapes; long hair falls into ribbons of light and shade. That is the good half of figure painting, available without the hard half.
If you are painting one anyway
Do the face when you are fresh. Not at the end of a long session. It is a small area with a disproportionate effect on the result.
Get the tonal shapes right before worrying about color. The lit side, the shaded side and the boundary between them do more work than any individual skin tone.
Soften the skin transitions, keep the feature edges. Where two skin sections meet on a cheek or a forehead, run a barely damp clean brush along the seam while both are wet. The line between an eyelid and an eye, on the other hand, should stay crisp. Knowing which is which is the whole craft. Our guide to blending on a numbered canvas covers the technique.
The eyes last, and slowly. Usually two or three tiny sections including a white catchlight. That catchlight is what makes the difference between a person and a mannequin, and it should not be blended or enlarged.
Do not correct the drawing. If a feature looks slightly off partway through, finish the surrounding sections before you decide. A shape judged against bare canvas looks completely different once its neighbors are painted, and repainting a face freehand almost always makes it worse.
The route that actually works
Most people searching for this want a specific person rather than a generic figure — a daughter, a mother, a wedding photograph, a grandmother in her twenties. That is what our custom kits made from your own photograph are for, and portraits are among the most common things people send.
Everything above still applies, so the photograph matters enormously:
- Get close. The head should fill a good part of the frame. A face that is small in the photo becomes a face made of slivers on the canvas.
- Side light, not flat light. Light from a window at an angle gives you the shadow shapes that make a face look solid. Direct flash flattens a face into a pale disc and there is nothing for the design to work with.
- One person, or two at most, unless you go large. Every additional face divides the available detail. If there are several people, the 18 by 24 is the size to choose.
- Sharp and well exposed. No amount of care at our end recovers detail the camera did not capture. A slightly blurred photo produces a slightly blurred painting.
- A plain background helps. A busy background competes with the face for the viewer's attention and for the design's detail budget.
One caution: send a photograph you own. A professional portrait, a school photo or a studio wedding image belongs to the photographer who took it, and we cannot work from those without their permission.
If you would rather see what we do make, everything is in the full collection, and the customer gallery shows finished work from people who are not professional painters.
