Autumn is the easiest season to paint badly and still end up with something good. Red, orange and yellow sit close together on the wheel, so a region filled slightly off still reads as a leaf. Compare that to a snow scene, where two greys half a tone apart decide whether the canvas looks finished. If someone in your house has never painted and is about to start, hand them an autumn canvas.
There is no autumn collection here. The kits are spread through Landscapes, Animals & Wildlife and Floral & Botanical. What follows is what is actually in stock, grouped by what you would hang it above.
The wide landscapes
Autumn River Splendor and Autumn Whisper River are the two river scenes, and they are close enough that picking between them comes down to whether you want the water bright or dark. The reflections are the interesting part of both: the same colours as the trees, broken into smaller regions, painted last.
Fall Lake Cabin puts a building in the middle of that, which gives the eye somewhere to land. Autumn Red Barn does the same thing in a field instead of by water, and the barn red against the leaves is the strongest single colour contrast in the range.
Misty Autumnal Peace is the quiet one. Muted, grey-heavy, and the only autumn kit here that behaves like a winter kit in terms of difficulty. Take the 48 colour version.
Close up on the trees
Vibrant Maple is wall-to-wall leaves with no horizon at all. It is repetitive in the way knitting is repetitive, which is either exactly what you want after work or exactly what you do not.
The Last Leaves is the counterpoint, mostly bare branch with a few leaves left, and it finishes in half the time. Autumn Glow and Magnificent Fall sit between the two.
Animals in the leaves
This is the group people buy for other people. Golden Retriever in Autumn Leaves and Dachshund in the Leaves are the two dogs. Autumn Shiba is the third, and the face is the hardest of the three because the markings are precise rather than soft.
Tiger in the Leaves hides an orange animal in an orange background, which sounds like a mistake and is in fact the best canvas in this section. Raven on the Maple Branch goes the other way, one black shape against red, and it is the graphic one.
If the animal you actually want is your own, the custom kit takes a photograph and turns it into numbered regions, from $19.95. A dog on a lawn in October is an easy photograph to convert, far easier than an indoor one, because the light is even.
Harvest and pumpkins
Four kits carry the harvest without going anywhere near Halloween: Old Truck with Pumpkins, Pumpkin Patch at Dusk, Harvest Wreath and Mushroom Cottage in the Autumn Forest. All four stay up until December without anybody wondering why.
The sunflower kits belong here too, at the start of the season rather than the end. Sunflower Field at Golden Hour is the big one, Straw Hat in the Sunflowers the narrative one, and Sunflower and Monarch the small one.
One thing to do differently on an autumn canvas
Because the colours are so close together, the risk is not getting one wrong; it is the canvas going uniformly muddy. The fix is to keep the darkest region genuinely dark. Do not soften it, do not blend it into its neighbour, and do not paint it thin. Everything else in the scene reads as bright only in relation to that one region.
A related habit that helps here: rinse the brush properly between a red and a yellow. Autumn palettes punish a lazy rinse more than any other subject, because the contamination is invisible until four regions later.
Sizes, prices, and when to order
Sixteen by twenty inches is the common choice, at $24.95 for 24 colours, $34.95 for 36 and $39.95 for 48. Twelve by sixteen is cheaper at $20.95 to $38.95 and suits the single-animal kits. Twenty by twenty six, at $29.95 to $48.95, is worth it for the wide landscapes and wasted on a wreath.
Printing takes one to three business days, delivery seven to fifteen. Shipping is free to the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand with no minimum. Order by the end of September if you want to paint while the actual trees still match the canvas.
There is a thirty day guarantee with a prepaid return label and a full refund including original shipping, and a running Buy 2, Get 1 Free offer that applies automatically at checkout.
On the colour-contamination point, mixing colours for smooth blending goes into more detail, and light to dark or dark to light covers the order question.
