There is an obvious objection to an abstract paint by numbers kit. Abstraction is meant to be the part of painting where nobody tells you what to do, and here is a canvas telling you exactly what to do. Worth answering, because the objection is wrong for an interesting reason.
What a Rothko or a Kandinsky actually requires is not spontaneity. It is a set of decisions about which colors sit next to which, in what proportion, with what edge between them. Those decisions are the hard part and they are what a well built numbered canvas hands you. What is left, mixing nothing, matching nothing, just laying color accurately into a shape, is the part that most people find calming and that most abstract painters would tell you takes up the majority of their studio time anyway.
The canvases
Abstract Fields is the closest thing here to color field painting: large flat areas, few transitions, and a finished result that depends entirely on whether you kept the edges clean. It is the fastest canvas in the abstract collection and the least forgiving of a sloppy boundary.
Abstract Expressionism is the opposite: gestural shapes, many small regions, no straight lines anywhere. Wobble is invisible on this one, which makes it the better first abstract despite looking harder.
Abstract Cosmos and Aurora Reflections both work from the dark end of the palette. They are the two that suit a room with a lot of white in it, because they give the eye somewhere solid to rest.
Geometric Rupture is hard edged and architectural. Take a ruler to the boundaries, mask nothing, and accept that this one will take two evenings longer than the others.
Abstract Floral Swirls and Grateful Mandala both use radial symmetry, which means the canvas tells you immediately when a region is the wrong color. Some people find that reassuring and some find it maddening.
Edges, which is the entire craft here
On a landscape a ragged boundary reads as texture. On a flat abstract it reads as a mistake, and it is the single thing that separates a finished abstract canvas that looks bought from one that looks made at a kitchen table.
Use the smallest brush in the kit for the perimeter of a region and the largest for the middle, and do the perimeter first while the brush is freshly loaded and the bristles have a point. Work the boundary in short strokes along it rather than pushing into it. And paint the lighter of two adjacent colors second, because a light acrylic covers a dark one poorly and any correction has to go in that direction.
Thin coats, twice, with twenty minutes between. The full method is in our guide to layering, and it matters more on flat color than on anything else.
If you have never painted at all
Bold and Free is the entry point. Large regions, strong color separation, and it looks like a finished painting when it is two thirds done, which is the property that gets people to the end of a first canvas.
Size
Abstraction scales up better than any other subject, because there is no detail to lose and no face to distort. The 20x26 inch canvas at $29.95 and the 23.5 inch square are where these come into their own. The 12x12 at $19.95 works for a group of three hung together but on its own it reads as a coaster.
Your own photograph can go the same way, incidentally. Shoot something close enough that the subject is unrecognizable, paint peeling off a wall, water, rust on metal, and send it through the custom kit page. The tracing does the abstracting for you.
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Three recent abstract canvases: the Abstract Sunset Over Layered Waves, the Pastel Mountains Under a Pale Sun and the Terracotta Sunrise Over Mustard Hills.
