Yellow is the color people are most nervous about putting on a wall, and sunflowers are how it gets past the nervousness. A field of them reads as warm rather than as loud, and it does something no other subject does: it makes a north facing room look like it gets sun.
Which is why this list is sorted by room. A sunflower canvas that works over a kitchen table is the wrong one for a bedroom.
Kitchen and dining room
This is the natural home for the subject and the reason is prosaic: the room already contains yellow, in wood, in light, in food. Sunflower Field at Golden Hour is the one to hang here. The low sun pushes the palette towards orange and stops the canvas competing with whatever is on the table.
Straw Hat in the Sunflowers is the alternative if a plain field feels too much like wallpaper. There is an object in it, so the eye has somewhere to land. More on what belongs in this room in our kitchen and dining room guide.
A hallway or a landing
Narrow spaces with no natural light are where a single bright canvas does the most work for the least money. Dance of a Sunflower is a close study rather than a field, so it holds up at the short viewing distance a corridor forces on you. Sunflower Painting by Numbers Premium Kit is the denser option, with more going on per square inch.
A child's room
Giraffe with Sunflowers is the outlier of the group and the most requested. An animal against the flowers, warm all the way through, and simple enough in its shapes that a ten year old can paint it with help. Sunflower and Monarch adds a butterfly and a finer set of regions, so it suits an older child or an adult painting beside one.
A room that already has a lot in it
If the walls are busy, the sunflower canvas has to be quieter. The Verdant Home uses the same palette family but leads with green, and Butterfly Sunflower breaks the yellow up with enough other color that it sits alongside pattern instead of shouting over it.
Painting yellow badly, and how not to
Yellow acrylic is the least opaque pigment in the box. One coat over a white canvas comes out pale and chalky, and the instinct is then to load more paint on, which leaves ridges. The fix is two thin coats with twenty minutes between them. Do every yellow region on the canvas, make a cup of tea, do them all again.
The other habit worth having: paint the darkest numbers first, usually the seed heads and the shadowed leaves. Yellow next to a finished dark reads as bright. Yellow on a white canvas reads as beige, and half the people who give up on a sunflower kit give up at that stage.
Sizes
12x12 inches at $19.95 for a single bloom. 16x20 at $24.95 for a field, because a field needs the width. 20x26 at $29.95 over a dining table, where the viewing distance is three meters and anything smaller disappears.
Sunflowers carry more art history than any other flower, and if that is what draws you, the same argument runs through our piece on painting Van Gogh.
Your own photograph works too, and sunflowers photograph well because the shapes are unambiguous. Upload it on the custom kit page. Free shipping to the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand, thirty days to return it.
Three newer sunflower kits: the Sunflowers in a Blue Vase, the White Farmhouse among Sunflowers and the Pug with Sunflowers.
