printable colour by number, made by a person
your dog. the wedding. the house you grew up in. one photo becomes a numbered kit you can actually finish, and every colour in it is matched to the markers and pencils already in your cup.
two ways to paint it
the same picture, the same numbers, whichever you already own.
a printable PDF. eighteen outlines to choose from, a swatch card matched to ohuhu, copic, prismacolor and polychromos, and a page per colour. print the faintest outline and nothing shows in your finished piece.
see the printable kitsa layered kit for procreate, and it works the same in fresco, clip studio and krita. colour drop through the numbers, then switch both the numbers and the outlines off. what is left is a painting.
see the iPad kitsready tonight
each one is a deliberately different night in. the counts are real, taken out of the kit files, not estimated.
six slices of kiwi caught mid-air on a hot yellow background, with three blueberries falling past them.
citrus cut in half and laid out from above: oranges, pink grapefruit, lemons and limes on a clean white table.
a painterly wash of sunset colour: gold and butter yellow burning through coral and hot pink into deep violet. no subject, no edges, just colour doing what it wants.
two grapefruit cocktails in hard summer sunlight, with rosemary sprigs, orange slices and a scatter of baby's breath.
a little cluster of woodland mushrooms on a bank of moss, shot close and low, with the forest falling away into soft green behind them.
a quiet corner of a cafe at dusk: two blond wooden chairs, a little round table, a wall of paperbacks, and a window with the blue evening street on the other side.
a capybara in close-up, side on, all warm ginger fur and long pale whiskers against soft out-of-focus sand.
your photo
send one photo and it comes back as a numbered kit you can actually finish. I look at it first and tell you honestly whether it will paint well, and swap it for free if it will not.
the part nothing else does
a free tracer hands you a hex code and wishes you luck. every kit here names the closest colour in four standard sets, by code and by name, on a card printed at true 1-inch squares so you can swatch your own markers right beside it.
320 alcohol markers
357 alcohol markers
150 coloured pencils
120 coloured pencils
797 of the 947 colours across those four sets rest on real hand swatches, blended from nine independent swatch sets and checked against each maker's own chart. the rest are the maker's own chart corrected by that line's measured shift. where nothing comes close, the card says no close marker match instead of pointing you at something wrong.
the honest comparison
they are real and some of them are decent. this is what you get for paying instead.
| what you get | a hello paint kit | a free generator |
|---|---|---|
| outlines to print | eighteen: four darknesses, plain or numbered, with or without the colour bar | one |
| a page per colour | yes, plus a build-up page showing the picture as it grows | no |
| matched to real markers | ohuhu, copic, prismacolor and polychromos, by code and by name | a hex code, if that |
| piece count before you buy | yes, and the count of pieces smaller than a size-0 brush tip | no |
| a person looks at your photo | yes, and says so if it will not paint well. free photo swaps | no |
start to finish
no drawing needed, ever. if you can match a number to a number, you can paint this.
in an etsy message. tell me what you will colour with and who it is for.
that it will survive being cut into flat colours. free photo swaps if it will not, and I will tell you why.
a watermarked preview, usually the same evening. one round of changes is free.
within 1 to 2 days of approving the proof. five PDFs, or a zip if you are painting on an iPad.
print it at home or at any print shop, or open it on your tablet. no drawing needed, ever.
the tracing and the numbering are computer-assisted, by a program I wrote and keep fixing. then I check and finish every kit by hand. it is not a stock file and it is not a machine left alone with your photo.
premade kits download the moment you buy. custom kits land in your inbox within 1 to 2 days of you approving the proof.
your idea, everyone's kit
a pumpkin patch. a lighthouse in fog. a bowl of ramen. if you want to paint it, someone else does too. tell me and it might turn up in the shop.
no surprises
no, and that is on purpose. everything is digital: printable PDFs for paper, or a zip of layered files for procreate. nothing ships, nothing gets lost in the post, and you can print your outline again if you ruin one.
because a free generator hands you one machine trace and wishes you luck. a kit here is eighteen outlines at four darknesses, a page per colour, the piece count and the small-piece warning in writing before you pay, and a swatch card that names the closest ohuhu, copic, prismacolor and polychromos for every colour in the kit. and a person looks at your photo first and tells you if it will not paint well.
alcohol markers, coloured pencils, acrylics or watercolour all work. the kits are built around ohuhu and copic markers and prismacolor and polychromos pencils, and every colour carries its exact hex and RGB, so anything else in your pen cup still works.
on paper, no: print the faintest plain outline to colour on and keep the numbered one beside you as your map. on an iPad, no: the numbers are on their own layer and so are the outlines, and both switch off at the end.
no. no drawing needed, ever. if you can match a number to a number, you can paint this. nobody is grading this.