Pine Tabletop Easel: 44 cm, Adjustable Angle

You can pick how many colors you want in your kit. The more colors, the more detail.

The custom kit offers 24, 36 or 48 colors. Twenty-four gives fewer shades to manage; 36 and 48 offer more color variation. More colors do not guarantee a lifelike result or a particular completion time. Sharpness, light, crop and canvas size also affect the result.

What does paint by numbers mean?

Taken literally, it is a way of painting a picture without drawing it. The canvas comes printed with outlined areas, every area carries a number, and every number matches a pot of paint. You open pot 7, fill every area marked 7, close it, and move on. Nothing has to be drawn, measured or mixed, which is why a first canvas works exactly like a twentieth.

The phrase also has a figurative meaning in English. Saying that something was done "by the numbers" or "paint by numbers" means it followed a formula step by step, with little room for personal choice: a paint-by-numbers thriller, a paint-by-numbers campaign. The expression comes straight from the hobby kits of the 1950s.

Where it came from

The kits were developed in Detroit at the Palmer Paint Company. Its owner, Max Klein, had asked a commercial artist, Dan Robbins, for a children's coloring product. Robbins came back with a numbered painting, borrowing the idea from the way Renaissance workshops had apprentices fill in numbered patterns. Palmer sold the kits under the Craft Master name from the early 1950s, and they turned into one of the decade's best-selling hobbies, with sales counted in the millions of kits. In 2001 the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History gave the craze its own exhibition, Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s. Robbins died in 2019 at 93.

What you get in a kit

• A printed canvas. Ours come in five sizes, from 12"x12" (30x30 cm) to 23.5"x23.5" (60x60 cm), unframed or with a DIY frame kit.
• Numbered acrylic pots, already mixed. Every design is offered with 24, 36 or 48 colors: 24 for large, easy areas, 48 for fine detail.
• Brushes in several sizes, so the small areas stay clean.

A free printable sheet is a good way to see whether you enjoy it before buying anything.

Why people paint by numbers

• An hour without a screen. Most people paint in the evening, one section at a time, and stop when they feel like stopping. The canvas waits.
• Your own photo. Send us a picture and we turn it into a numbered canvas: a dog, a house, a wedding shot. Custom kits are here, and the free generator shows what your photo would look like first.
• A large choice of designs. We counted more than 670 in our catalogue in October 2026. The largest groups are landscapes, flowers, animals, ocean scenes and space, with cities, abstracts and portraits behind them.