Worth clearing up first: we do not sell a Warhol kit or a Lichtenstein kit. Nobody legitimately does. Both estates are active and both are litigious, and a store promising you a licensed Marilyn for twenty dollars is promising something it cannot deliver.
What is available is the visual language those two worked in. Flat color, hard edges, no blending, a subject pushed to the front of the frame and cranked up in saturation. That is also, as it happens, an almost perfect description of what a numbered canvas does naturally.
Why the style and the format fit
Every paint by numbers kit divides an image into regions of flat color. In a landscape that is a compromise, and you spend effort softening the borders so it reads as light rather than as patches. In pop art the patches are the point. Nothing to soften, nothing to blend, no gradient to fake. A canvas in this style painted by a beginner looks closer to the intended result than a beginner's landscape ever does.
The five to look at
- Lips Expression. The most literal pop art piece we carry. One subject, enormous, in primary color, exactly the register Lichtenstein worked in without borrowing anything of his.
- Bold and Free. Large blocks, high contrast, no subject to get right.
- Bold Dawn. Same treatment applied to a horizon. Reads as pop from across a room and as landscape up close.
- Twisting Colors. Ribbons of saturated color. The longest of the five, because there are a lot of regions, but none of them are hard.
- Vivid Dystopia. A city in impossible color. The one with actual drawing in it.
All five sit in the Abstract collection alongside the mandalas and the color field pieces.
Painting flat color properly
Two things separate a clean pop art canvas from a patchy one, and both are about coverage rather than skill.
Acrylic from a small pot goes on thin. One coat over a printed number leaves the number faintly visible and the color looking chalky. Let the first coat dry, which takes about fifteen minutes, and put a second one over it. Every region, no exceptions, or the coated ones will stand out against the rest.
The second is edges. Work from the middle of a region outward and stop short of the line, then come back with the fine brush and walk the border. Trying to hit the edge on the first pass is how the color ends up in the neighboring region.
Sizes for this style
Pop art wants scale. The 20x26 inch canvas at $29.95 or the 23.5x23.5 jumbo at $46.95 do far more for this style than the 12x12 at $19.95, because the impact comes from the size of the color fields. Color count matters less here than anywhere else in the catalogue: 24 colors is genuinely enough, and flat color is the one subject where the 48 color option does not obviously pay for itself.
Your own face, in that treatment
A portrait photograph run through the custom kit page comes back as numbered regions of flat color, which is structurally the Warhol treatment even though the picture is yours. Take 20x26 or larger and 48 colors for a face. From $19.95, up to $64.95 for the largest combination.
Kits ship with the canvas, numbered acrylics, three brushes and a reference print. One to three business days to print, seven to fifteen in transit, free shipping to the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand. Thirty day returns with a prepaid label.
