Starry Night is the painting everyone asks for, and it is also one of the harder Van Gogh pictures to paint by numbers, because every swirl in that sky is a separate region. The store carries five other Van Gogh kits, drawn after paintings from the last three years of his life, and three of them are easier than Starry Night while being just as recognisable. Here they are, from the gentlest to the most demanding, with the painting each one follows.

Almond Blossom (1890)

Almond Blossom after Van Gogh follows the painting he made in early 1890 for his newborn nephew: white blossom on dark branches against a flat turquoise sky. It is the easiest of the five. The sky is one broad color with slight variation, the branches are long dark shapes, and the blossoms are small white and pink regions that you paint last, on top of a finished sky. It is also the one most people hang in a bedroom or a nursery, for the same reason Van Gogh painted it. It sits in the famous paintings collection with the other four.

Sunflowers (1888)

Sunflowers after Vincent van Gogh follows the version with fifteen sunflowers in a yellow vase against a pale yellow wall, painted in Arles in August 1888 and now in the National Gallery in London. Almost the whole canvas is yellow, which sounds monotonous and is the opposite: the kit separates the yellows into distinct tones, and the picture comes alive when the ochres and the pale lemon sit next to each other. The seed heads in the centre of each flower are the detailed part. The wall and the table are quick.

Irises (1889)

Irises after Van Gogh follows the painting from the asylum garden at Saint-Remy in 1889: a bed of blue and violet irises with orange marigolds behind. The irises are many mid-sized regions in a handful of blues, and each flower has the same structure, so the work becomes rhythmic after the first few. The marigolds at the back are small orange dabs. Of the five kits it has the richest color on the wall, and it is the one we would recommend to someone who has already finished a landscape and wants flowers.

Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889)

Wheat Field with Cypresses after Van Gogh follows the Provence landscape from the summer of 1889: golden wheat in the foreground, dark cypresses rising on the right, and swirling clouds over blue hills. Here the clouds bring back some of the Starry Night difficulty. Each curl of cloud is its own region in white, cream or pale blue, and there are a lot of them. The wheat and the cypresses are generous. If you want the energy of his brushwork without a whole sky of it, this is the compromise.

Starry Night over the Rhone (1888)

Starry Night over the Rhone after Van Gogh follows the earlier, calmer night painting, made on the river bank in Arles in September 1888: the gas lamps of the town reflected as long gold streaks across the dark water, a few boats at the shore, and the Great Bear overhead. The sky and the water are deep blues in wide regions, the reflections are long vertical strokes of gold, and the stars are small dots painted at the very end. It is more demanding than Almond Blossom but far less fiddly than the Saint-Remy Starry Night, and it is the picture people mean when they say they want a night scene by Van Gogh that will not take all winter.

Colors, sizes and time

All five come in five sizes from a 12x12 inch square to a 23.5 inch square, with 24, 36 or 48 colors. For Van Gogh, buy 48 if you can. His pictures depend on close tones sitting next to each other, and the extra colors are what keep a yellow wall from being one flat yellow. On size, the 16x20 inch canvas suits all five; the Wheat Field and the Rhone gain from the 20x26 because the cloud and reflection regions get bigger. Expect two or three weekends per kit, a little less for Almond Blossom.

For a quieter companion piece, the Monet kits and the Klimt kits sit in the same collection. If you are gifting one, the gift guide covers how to pick a size for someone else.

Questions people ask

Are these exact copies of the paintings?

They are drawn after the paintings, with the composition kept and the brushwork simplified into regions that each hold a single flat color. The finished canvas reads as the painting from across a room.

Which Van Gogh kit is easiest?

Almond Blossom, then Sunflowers. Both have a plain background and a limited palette.

Do the kits come with the right blues and yellows?

Each kit ships with its own numbered paint pots matched to the canvas. Nothing has to be mixed.