The honest number first: there are two wolf canvases in this catalogue, not a dozen. Every shop writing about wolf paint by numbers implies a whole collection, and then the collection turns out to be huskies with the word wolf in the product title. Ours are these.
The two wolves
Wildland Wolf is a single animal, head and shoulders, against a cold background. The face is where the work is. The eyes and the muzzle occupy maybe a tenth of the canvas and they carry the whole thing, so this is a kit where the 48 color option earns its money: gray fur needs six or seven values to stop looking like felt.
Twin Wolves is the harder canvas and the better one to hang. Two animals means the composition has a relationship in it rather than a pose, and the overlapping bodies give you edges to paint rather than a silhouette. Not a first kit.
What people actually want when they search for this
Usually it is one of two things: the snow, or the face of a canine looking straight out of the canvas. Both are available without a wolf in them.
Husky in the Snowfall is the closest thing to Wildland Wolf in the catalogue and it is easier to paint, because the coat has real color breaks in it instead of a continuous gray. Spry Husky is brighter and more active. Fox in the Birch Wood trades the gray palette for orange against white bark, which is the most forgiving version of this kind of picture. All of them sit in Animals and Wildlife.
Painting fur so it does not look flat
The instinct is to fill each numbered region to its edge with a loaded brush. On fur that produces visible patchwork. Two habits fix it.
Work from the darkest number to the lightest across the whole animal, not region by region. The darks establish where the body is and every lighter tone then has a reference to sit against.
Keep the brush slightly dry at the boundary between two adjacent greys and drag the second color a millimetre into the first while it is still wet. You are not blending the way an oil painter blends, you are just softening a line that would otherwise read as a border. On a canvas with forty eight numbers there are hundreds of those borders and softening them is the difference between a kit and a painting.
Snow, which is the other half of the subject
Half the appeal here is the winter setting rather than the animal. If that is the part you want, the winter landscape guide covers the canvases built around snow rather than around a face, and the trick of painting white with five near neutrals instead of one white.
If the animal you actually want is your own dog, the same fur problem applies and the canvas comes from your photograph: the custom kit page traces it and mixes the paints to match. A husky or a german shepherd in profile converts about as well as anything we handle.
Sizes run 12x12 inches at $19.95 through to a 23.5 inch square. For an animal portrait take 16x20 at $24.95 as the floor. Free shipping to the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand, thirty day guarantee with a prepaid return label.
