A Painting Evening That Works Alone or With Company

Most paint night advice assumes a group. Invites, a theme, somebody bringing something. All of which is fine, and none of which helps on a Wednesday when it is just you and the kitchen table.

A painting evening works perfectly well for one. It is arguably better alone, because nobody is waiting for you to finish and nobody has opinions about your sky.

Here is how to set one up so it feels like an evening you chose rather than a craft project you have to get through. Everything below works for one person. The last section covers what changes when somebody joins you.

What a painting evening is

Two or three hours at a table with a canvas, a lamp, something to listen to and something to eat. That is the whole of it.

The reason it works better than an evening of good intentions is that the decisions are already made. You know where you are sitting, you know what you are doing, and the canvas tells you what comes next. There is no point in the evening where you have to work out what to do with yourself.

It helps to think of it as an appointment rather than a task. A task has to be finished. An appointment just has to be kept.

Setting up the table

Ten minutes of setup buys you two hours of not getting up.

You want the canvas square in front of you, the pots where your painting hand can reach without crossing the canvas, and everything else pushed out of the way. If you are right handed, pots on the right. If you are left handed, the opposite.

From your own cupboard:

• Two cups of water, one for rinsing and one that stays clean
• A few sheets of paper towel
• An old plate or a scrap of card to rest brushes on
• Something to protect the table
• A cushion, if the chair is the dining kind

Our kits bring the rest. Real canvas, a numbered pot for every color, six brushes and a printed picture of the finished design. If the canvas came rolled, flatten it under a few heavy books the night before so you are not fighting curled corners all evening.

The one thing worth spending money on is nothing to do with paint. It is a table you can leave set up. If you have a corner that does not need clearing, use that corner, even if the light is slightly worse. Packing away is what turns a weekly evening into a monthly one.

Light, and why it decides how long you last

This is the part everyone skips and then blames themselves for.

Painting a numbered canvas is close work. Under a ceiling light you will be squinting at numbers within twenty minutes, your neck will ache, and you will decide you are tired when you are only badly lit.

Put a lamp beside you, at about head height, angled so the light falls over your shoulder onto the canvas rather than into your eyes. A cheap adjustable desk lamp does it. If you can choose the bulb, a cool white one makes the numbers easier to read than a warm yellow one, although a warm bulb is nicer to sit under, so pick whichever problem you would rather have.

Daylight is better than any lamp, which is worth knowing if your evenings are flexible. A Sunday afternoon at a window beats a Tuesday night under a bulb, every time.

Food and drink that will not end up on the canvas

The practical rule is one hand. Anything you can eat with one hand, without looking, and without grease, is fine. Anything that needs a knife means putting the brush down.

Things that work: grapes, nuts in a small bowl, crackers, cheese cut up before you start, chocolate, a handful of olives, carrot sticks. Things that do not: anything saucy, anything that crumbles into your lap, hot food that needs eating while it is hot.

Keep the drink away from the water cups and on the opposite side from your painting hand. Two glasses of similar liquid beside each other is how brushes end up in squash and paint gets thinned with tea. A mug with a lid is quietly the best thing you can bring to a painting table.

Eat before you start if you are properly hungry. Hunger is the most common reason a good evening stops at forty minutes.

Something to listen to

This is the choice that most changes how the evening feels, and it is worth thinking about for a minute rather than putting on whatever is nearest.

Painting takes your hands and your eyes and leaves your ears free, so the ideal thing to listen to is something you can follow without looking. A long interview program, an audiobook, a radio drama, a documentary podcast, a familiar album. Anything with a plot works better than anything with a screen.

Avoid things you have to watch. A television on in the corner means you either keep looking up, which is how a brush dries out mid-shape, or you ignore it and wonder why you put it on.

Silence is also a real option and plenty of people prefer it. If you have not tried a canvas in a quiet room, try one evening of it before you decide. Some people find it is the only time all week their head is quiet.

What to paint

The design decides how the evening goes more than anything else on this page.

For a first evening

Look for big open shapes and a clear difference between light and dark. A branch of blossom, a single flower, a landscape with a lot of sky. You want to cover ground in the first hour, because watching the picture appear is what makes you want the second hour.

Our beginner collection is sorted on exactly that basis, and the beginner guide walks through a first canvas in order, including what to paint first and what to do when the paint goes over a line.

For a longer run

If you already know how your hand behaves, a busier design gives you more evenings out of one canvas. Water with reflections, a town on a hillside, fur, feathers, a night scene.

These take several sittings rather than one, which suits a weekly evening better than a simple design does. You are not trying to finish. You are trying to have somewhere to come back to.

Either way, pick a picture you would be happy to see on a wall, and pick the larger canvas if the design has fine detail in it. We print two sizes, Classic at 12 by 16 inches and Large at 16 by 20 inches, and the bigger one has roomier shapes, which paints faster even though there is more of it.

How long to go, and when to stop

Forty minutes is a real sitting. Two hours is a good one. Beyond about three, most people start making mistakes they will want to fix next time.

The useful habit is to stop while you still want to carry on. Finish the color you are on, close the pot, rinse the brush, and leave the table as it is. Stopping with a bit of appetite left is what gets you back to the chair next week. Grinding on until you are sick of it does the opposite.

Two signs it is time to stop: you have started painting over the lines on shapes you would have got right an hour ago, or you have stopped noticing the thing you are listening to. Both mean the same thing.

Before you leave it, rinse every brush properly and pinch the bristles back into a point. A brush left to dry with paint in it is the only part of this that is genuinely hard to undo.

Making it a weekly thing

One evening a week survives a bad week. Every evening does not.

Attach it to something that already happens so you are not relying on remembering. After Sunday dinner, or the night the bins go out, or whatever your week already has in it. Pick the night you are least likely to be asked to do something else.

Leave the next step visible. If you stopped halfway through a color, leave that pot out at the front. You want to sit down and start, rather than sit down and work out where you were.

Expect a dull middle. On most canvases there is a stretch where the easy areas are done and the picture is not far enough along to admire. That is the week people quit. Do one color and stop. The last quarter goes quickly, and the evening you finish a canvas is genuinely a good evening.

When it is done, hang it. The point of the whole exercise is partly that a few weeks of your evenings end up on a wall where you keep seeing them. If you want that picture to mean something already, send us a photograph and we will make it into a custom kit with its own numbered canvas and matched paints.

Doing it with a friend or partner

Everything above still applies. Four things change.

• Two canvases, not one shared canvas. Sharing sounds sociable and in practice one person waits while the other paints a shape.
• Two lamps, or one lamp between you with both canvases angled into it. Sitting across a table in a shared pool of light is where this usually falls down.
• Agree the listening in advance. One audiobook you both follow, or music, or nothing. Two sets of headphones is also a perfectly friendly evening.
• Let people work at different speeds without comment. Somebody who finishes half a sky in an evening is having exactly as good a time as somebody who finishes a whole one.

If you are posting a kit to someone so you can paint the same design at a distance, order early. Ours ship in six to ten business days, and matching designs is half the fun of doing it apart.

Questions about a painting evening at home

How much space do I actually need?

A canvas, two cups and a plate for brushes, so about the area of a large place setting. A 12 by 16 inch canvas fits on a small kitchen table with room for a drink. The limiting factor is usually elbow room rather than table size.

Do I have to finish it in one evening?

No, and almost nobody does. A canvas is built for several sittings. Acrylic dries in minutes, so you can stop mid-shape and pick it up a week later with nothing spoiled.

What if I make a mistake while I am tired?

Let it dry and paint the correct color over it next time. Acrylic dries opaque, so almost anything is fixable. What is not fixable is poking at a wet blob, so when something goes wrong late in the evening, the right move is to stop.

Is this worth doing if I have never painted?

This is close to the easiest possible way to start. There is no drawing and no color mixing. You match a number to a pot and fill in the shape, so the first evening goes well for almost everybody.

How do I pick a design I will come back to?

Pick the picture, not the difficulty. You will spend several evenings looking at it closely, so wanting to see it finished is what carries you through the middle. Our full catalog has over 850 designs, and the buyer's guide covers how to read a design before you buy it.