The useful part of a gift guide is the date, so here it is first. Printing and mixing takes one to three business days and delivery runs seven to fifteen. For a canvas to be under a tree on the twenty fifth of December, order by the last week of November. For a custom kit made from a photograph, make it the third week of November, because the tracing step adds a day at the front.
Everything below ships from the same warehouse under the same terms: free delivery to the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand, no minimum order. Elsewhere it is free above $69 and $7.95 flat under that.
The honest version of who this works for
Paint by numbers is a good gift for someone who has evenings and wants something to do with their hands. It is a poor gift for someone who already paints, because the numbered regions will irritate them, and a poor gift for a person who will feel obliged to finish it. If you cannot picture the recipient sitting down for three hours with a small brush, buy something else.
For everyone in between, the decision comes down to two things: the subject and the colour count. Twenty four colours is a gentle evening. Forty eight is genuinely detailed work and will take a week of evenings. Do not gift 48 colours to a beginner because it looks more generous.
For a parent or grandparent
The subject matters more than the difficulty here, and what tends to land is a place they know. The landscapes collection runs to around a hundred and thirty kits, which is enough to find a coastline, a mountain range or a lake that means something to them.
If they have a house full of pets, Pet Portraits has around seventy designs, with breed-specific canvases like Dachshund in the Leaves and Husky in the Snowfall. Choosing the right breed is the whole gift. Choosing a generic dog is not.
For someone who has never painted
Beginner Friendly holds around sixty kits with larger regions and fewer awkward gradients. From that shelf, Little Cow and Cute Baby Fox are the two that get finished most often, because the shapes are big enough that a first attempt still looks like the picture on the box.
Twelve by twelve inches at 24 colours is $19.95 and is the right size for a first kit. Sixteen by twenty at 36 colours is $34.95 and is the right size for a wall.
For a child
The nursery range is nine designs and is aimed at the room rather than the painter, but two of them work as gifts to paint: Nursery Fox Sleeping on the Moon and Nursery Baby Elephant with Balloons. Both are flat colour with clean edges.
Under about ten years old, sit with them. Acrylic dries fast and a loaded brush on a small region is how a canvas gets muddy.
For the person who is difficult to buy for
Two answers. The first is a custom kit from their own photograph. You send the image, we trace it into numbered regions, mix the paints to match it and ship the canvas with brushes. Prices run from $19.95 to $64.95 depending on size and colour count. A wedding photograph, a house they have just left, a dog that died last year: these are the ones people keep.
The second is the gift card, which is the right answer when you genuinely do not know their taste and would rather they picked. It is the one item in the Christmas collection that is not a canvas, which is worth knowing if you are counting what is in there: fifteen entries, fourteen of them kits.
Buying several
There is a standing offer on the store, not a seasonal one: buy two kits and the third is free, applied automatically at checkout on every kit we sell, the gift card being the only item it does not cover. Three 16x20 inch canvases at 36 colours come to $104.85 at list; with the third free you pay $69.90. It has been running since March 2025 with no end date attached.
What is in the box
A pre-printed canvas, numbered acrylic pots matching the design, three brushes and a printed reference image. Frames are sold separately and add $5 to $16. Nothing else is required, which is the reason this works as a gift at all: there is no second purchase waiting for the recipient.
If the canvas is wrong, the thirty day guarantee covers it. We send a prepaid return label and refund the order including the original shipping.
Still undecided on size, which is the question we get most often in December: the size guide walks through all five.
A few newer kits that wrap well: the Snow Globe with a Christmas Village, the Red and Gold Christmas Ornaments and the Glowing Lantern in the Snow.
