We do not sell an advent calendar, and the shops that claim to sell a paint by numbers advent calendar are usually selling twenty four tiny cards. What follows is the thing people actually want when they search for it: one real canvas, broken into twenty four evenings, finished on Christmas Eve.
It works because acrylic does not care about interruptions. Fifteen minutes of drying time, an unlimited pause, no palette to keep wet. Twenty minutes a night from the first of December is eight hours of painting, which is roughly a 16x20 inch canvas at 24 colors.
Choosing the canvas in November
Pick something with enough separate areas that a night's work is visible. A kit with four huge regions is finished on the fourth of December and then you have twenty days of nothing.
Christmas Cat is the one to give a child this treatment. Festive Cheer has the most numbered regions of the three and therefore parcels out best across the month. Festive Fusion is the brightest and the fastest. All of them and the rest sit in the Christmas collection.
Days 1 to 8, the dark colors
Start with the highest numbers, which on almost every kit are the darkest tones. There will be relatively few of these regions and they are scattered across the canvas, so the first week produces a strange constellation rather than a picture. That is correct and it is also the week most people abandon, so it helps to know in advance.
The point of doing it in this order is that every color after this has a dark to sit against. It is also the week where a mistake costs nothing, because everything painted afterwards is lighter and can be laid over it.
Days 9 to 17, the mid tones
This is the bulk of the canvas and the stretch where it starts to look like the thing on the box. Two colors an evening. Rinse the brush properly between them: a green contaminated with red goes brown, and on a Christmas canvas half the palette is red.
If the kit is a snow scene, this is where the near neutrals come in, and the temptation is to treat them all as white. They are not. Trust the numbers even when two pots look identical in the pot, because they will not look identical on the canvas.
Days 18 to 24, the light and the detail
Highlights last, thinnest brush, least paint. A snowfall, a window light, the rim of a bauble. Three of these evenings are ten minutes rather than twenty, which is a relief in the week before Christmas.
Leave the very last pass, whatever it is, for the twenty fourth. Finishing a painting on Christmas Eve is the whole reason for doing it this way.
Two people, two canvases
The version that works in a household is one canvas each, worked on at the same table at the same time. It removes the negotiation about who paints what and it gives you two finished pictures on the twenty fourth. The winter landscapes in our snow scene guide pair well with the festive kits for that.
Ordering in time
One to three business days to process and seven to fifteen to deliver, so the middle of November is the point at which this stops being safe. Shipping is free to the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand with no minimum. A custom canvas from your own photograph needs the same lead time plus the tracing, so order that one earlier.
