Best Paint by Numbers Kits for Anime and Manga Fans
There are two ways to get anime on a canvas, and only one of them gets you a specific character. If you want Zenitsu, or your OC, or a frame you paused and screenshotted, no shop on earth stocks that as a ready-made anime paint by numbers kit. You have to have it made. If what you actually want is the world those characters live in, the Fuji skyline, the koi pond, the lanterns in the trees, that ships today.
Both start at $19.95 at ArtistryByNumbers, with free worldwide shipping and Buy 2 Get 1 Free.
For a specific character or scene
Custom Paint By Numbers Kit: from $19.95. Upload the image, we trace it into numbered zones, mix the acrylics to match your palette, and ship it with brushes. Screenshots, fan art you have the rights to, cosplay photos, a drawing of your own. It works on flat cel-shaded art especially well, because anime already paints in blocks of colour, that is more or less what a numbered canvas is.
Browse the anime & Japanese-inspired kits if you would rather pick something that is already designed.
Ready-made kits with the anime look
None of these are licensed anime. They are the scenery anime borrows from, painted in the same register, high-contrast skies, soft gradients, a lot of blue and pink. Hung on a wall next to a character piece they read as one set.
Fuji's Eternity
Mount Fuji with the snowline catching light. This is the single most recognisable backdrop in Japanese art, and it turns up in the establishing shot of roughly every anime that leaves the city. Mid difficulty: the sky gradient is the part that takes patience.
Serene Koi Pond
Orange and white koi under green water. Small zones, lots of them, this is the one to pick if you like slow, detailed work rather than big flat areas.
Cherry Blossom Festival
Sakura in full bloom. The hanami scene is a fixture of the genre, every school anime gets one episode under these trees, and it is forgiving to paint because the blossoms hide any wobble in your edges.
Illuminated Woodland
Lanterns strung through dark trees. The closest thing in the catalogue to a Ghibli spirit-forest, and the best of the set for a bedroom wall because the palette is warm rather than bright.
Moonlit Waters
Night water under a full moon. Deep blues, a hard light source, very little else. Easy to finish, hard to make boring.
Wave of Flowers
A breaking wave built out of flowers. It is a direct nod to the Hokusai print everyone knows, done in a modern palette.
See all 12 anime & Japanese-inspired kits
Turning an anime image into a kit that actually works
Not every screenshot converts well. A few things we have learned from the ones people send
- Close crops beat wide shots. A face and shoulders gives the tracing enough room to separate hair, skin and background; a full-body action frame at canvas size turns the face into four zones.
- Bright, evenly lit frames convert better than dark ones. Night scenes lose their whole point when every shadow collapses into one number.
- Higher resolution helps, but composition matters more. A clean 800px still beats a blurry 4K freeze-frame.
- Two characters is usually the ceiling on a standard canvas. Beyond that, go up a size.
Upload your image and we will tell you if it works before anything is printed.
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