Two figures wrapped in a cloak of gold, kneeling on a bed of flowers, one face turned up and the other bent down to meet it. Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss between 1907 and 1908, right at the peak of what people now call his Golden Phase. He used actual gold leaf, the same material his father worked with as a gold engraver, and the painting has lived at the Belvedere in Vienna almost since the day it was finished. Austria bought it before it was even fully dry.
Look closely and the two lovers are made of different patterns. His robe is all hard rectangles in black, white, and gold. Hers is soft circles and spirals and little flowers. Klimt was obsessed with Byzantine mosaics, he had seen the ones in Ravenna, and that flatness, that jewel-box glow, is what makes the picture feel less like a couple and more like an icon.
Why it translates beautifully
The Kiss is almost aggressively decorative, and decoration is exactly what numbered sections do well. All those rectangles and spirals in the robes become clean, satisfying little zones to fill. There is very little of the subtle skin-tone gradient that usually makes portraits hard. The faces are small, and most of the canvas is pattern, which means beginners get a wall-worthy result without needing years of blending practice.
Kits usually land around 24 to 36 colors, and a good chunk of those are metallic golds, ochres, and browns. That gold family is the heart of the painting, so do not skimp on drying time between the adjacent shades or they blur into one flat sheet. A 40x50cm canvas gives the patterns room to breathe. Budget 12 to 20 hours. The repetition in the robes is oddly meditative, and a lot of people knock out the gold in long, quiet sessions.
Handling the gold and the faces
Metallic paints behave differently from the flat acrylics. They are thinner, they streak if you brush back and forth, and they need a second coat more often than you would expect. Lay them in one direction, let them dry, then judge whether they need another pass. Two thin coats always beat one thick gloopy one.
The faces are tiny and they are the one place a wobble shows. Those are your last-thing-at-night, good-lighting, tiny-brush zones. If precision in small areas worries you, our piece on painting faces and portraits in paint by numbers walks through keeping features clean at a small scale. Do the vast gold field first to warm up, then tackle the faces when your hand is steady.
One more thing. Klimt's gold is not uniform in the original, it catches light unevenly, so if your kit gives you two or three golds, resist the urge to treat them as interchangeable. Follow the numbers exactly here. The variation is what stops the robe from looking like a solid block of foil.
On the wall
Finished, The Kiss is a statement. The gold picks up warm light in the evening and the whole thing seems to shift. It suits a bedroom or a hallway where it can be the one thing you notice. A slim black or gold frame flatters it. Skip anything ornate, the painting is busy enough.
Do not neglect the meadow at the bottom either. The lovers kneel on a little cliff of flowers, dozens of tiny colored dots that most people rush because they are tired by the time they get there. Those specks are what root the couple in the world instead of floating them in gold. Give them the same care you gave the robes, one clean dab per number, and let each dry before crowding the next. If a color starts to thicken in the pot, a single drop of water thins it back without killing the coverage. The base of the painting is small, fiddly work, but it is the part that reads as luxurious up close.
If you catch the masterpiece bug, our roundup of famous paintings you can recreate is a good next stop for choosing your second project. The Kiss sits in both our portrait and people kits and, thanks to all that pattern, our abstract collection. Pick your canvas from the best sellers and give yourself a weekend with Vienna's most famous embrace.