Question 1

Is the paint by numbers generator free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. You can upload an image and make a template with no account. Pick any canvas size, how much detail you want, how many colors, and which paints to mix from. The PDF has the outline, the numbers and the color list. The first 3 mixing recipes are free too. After that you have two choices. The free download also includes a color chart: every number printed as a square, about 4 cm across. Mix a color, hold it next to the square, and change it until it matches. Many painters work this way. Or buy the recipes. Then each number tells you exactly how much of each tube to use, and there is nothing to guess.

Question 2

Are the recipes on the free printables free as well?

Accepted Answer

Yes, all of them. Every template in the printables gallery comes with every mixing recipe included, free, with no account and no payment: pick any number on the page or on the printed paint list and it tells you the parts of real tubes that make that color. Those pictures are ours, so there is nothing to buy. What is sold is the recipes for a template you generate from an image of your own.

Question 3

Is this for beginners or for painters who already mix?

Accepted Answer

If you have finished a few kits and caught yourself fixing a pot's color with your own paint, this is the next step, and beginners are welcome too, because the recipe carries the mixing knowledge for you. A kit hands you tiny pre-mixed pots with no pigment on the label, that dry out, cannot be rebought, and a result decided in a factory; here you paint from a limited palette of real tubes bought in any art shop, with a reproducible recipe for every number so you can always mix more. Color you mixed yourself will not land exactly on a factory pot, and that is the point: it carries your hand.

Question 4

What paints do I need?

Accepted Answer

The ones you already have, if they came in one of the starter sets step 2 lists: Liquitex Basics 12 or 24, Winsor & Newton Galeria 10 in either size, Amsterdam Standard Series 12, Daler-Rowney System3 Introduction 10, or Golden Heavy Body Introductory or Principal 6. Pick your box and every tube in it comes up ticked, with the product number printed beside each name so you can check them against what is on your table, and you untick anything you do not own. If your paints are not one of those boxes, "I use other paints" opens the generic pigment palettes and any palette you have saved to your account, all of which work here on any plan. Every recipe is computed from the measured mixing behaviour of those specific tubes, so a different brand that happens to share a color name will mix differently, and the panel beside your template says which tubes this one actually uses.

Question 5

Can I use only the paints I already own?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and that is what step 2 is for: pick the starter set your paints came in and untick anything you do not own, either there or in the panel beside your finished template, then press Apply and the template is rebuilt so that every number on it is mixable from the tubes you kept. Two paints is the minimum, and the fewer you keep the further the colors drift from the image, which the preview shows you rather than hiding. A tube we have no verified mixing data for yet stays on the list and is marked, and it is left out of the recipes rather than guessed at. Once you save a template and buy its recipes they are frozen, so number 12 cannot change under you halfway through a canvas.

Question 6

Can I paint it with fewer tubes?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Untick the tubes you want to leave out, in step 2 or in the paints panel beside your finished template, press Apply, and the template is rebuilt from what is left. Try a few combinations and keep the one whose painted preview you like: a smaller palette is easier to mix and cheaper to buy, and the preview shows exactly what it costs in color before you print anything. Two tubes is the minimum.

Question 7

How do the mixing recipes work?

Accepted Answer

Each number is a color the engine matched to a mix of your paints using Kubelka-Munk pigment physics, the same engine behind the rest of Trycolors. The recipe is written in whole parts by volume, for example 5 parts Titanium White and 3 parts Ultramarine Blue. The Mixing setting decides how many paints a recipe may use: Simple keeps every number to two paints, Medium allows three and Hard allows four for the closest colors. Simple also keeps every part at 5% or more, so the mix is one a palette knife can measure; Medium and Hard use whatever proportions the color needs, which is what lets a pale gray be white with one percent of green in it instead of a beige. When an ingredient is too small to write as a part it shows as "a touch of" that paint, and a touch still matters: white with a trace of blue is a pale blue, not a white.

Question 8

What if my mixed paint dries out?

Accepted Answer

Mix it again from the recipe. The parts are named tubes you own, so a color is never gone the way a kit pot is gone, and the second mix will not be exactly the first: it carries a touch of your hand and your experience, which no factory pot ever will.

Question 9

Will my colors match the preview exactly?

Accepted Answer

Close, and slightly yours. The recipes are computed from real pigment data, so a careful mix lands near the color on screen, but not exactly on it: paint brands differ a little, a part measured by eye is not a part measured by scale, and paper and canvas shift how a color reads. Mixing the same recipe again gets you back to the same color, which is what matters when you run out mid-project.

Question 10

Will the template look like my photo?

Accepted Answer

Judge that yourself, on screen, before you print: the preview is the painted result, not an artist's impression. Faces and pets lose the most in any paint by numbers, because skin and fur are made of small color steps that numbers turn into flat areas. If the preview is not close enough, change the crop, the size, the detail or the color count and look again. It costs nothing to try, and the image stays beside the numbers for the details they cannot carry.

Question 11

How do I print the template?

Accepted Answer

Print the PDF at 100%, with scaling turned off. A4 and A3 come out of any home printer that takes that size of paper; the 40 x 50 cm size is laid out for a canvas, so it needs a large format print or a tiled print across several sheets. Print at the size you generated at rather than rescaling in the printer, because printing at any other scale changes the size of the areas and the smallest ones are already sized to be paintable.

Question 12

What canvas and paper sizes are supported?

Accepted Answer

A4 (297 x 210 mm), A3 (420 x 297 mm), 500 x 400 mm, which is the standard 40 x 50 cm canvas, and any custom size in millimetres, all of them free. The 40 x 50 cm canvas is the default because size decides how much detail the template keeps: the smallest area worth painting is a real measurement in millimetres, so a bigger sheet holds more of the picture. The numbers and the recipes do not change with the sheet, so number 7 is the same mix at every size, and the page picks portrait or landscape from your image.

Question 13

How many colors will my template have?

Accepted Answer

As many as you ask for, from 8 up to 40, on the Colors slider. The colors are worked out once from your image and numbered once, so the slider chooses how many of them a template uses rather than computing a new set: number 7 is the same mix whatever size, difficulty or count you print at. The count on a printed sheet can come out lower, because a color whose areas are all too small to paint at that size and difficulty is left off that sheet.

Question 14

What if a small detail or color is missing from my template?

Accepted Answer

A very small detail, a thin line or a color that sits between two numbers is folded into its neighbor, which is a limit of any paint by numbers rather than of this one. Keep the Image view open beside the painted preview and paint those details by eye, the way any painter works from a reference. The numbers are your underpainting, and the finishing is yours.

Question 15

Do you keep my image?

Accepted Answer

Only for a short time, unless you save. Your image is uploaded so we can turn it into color regions, and if you do not save the template it is deleted automatically within 48 hours; when you save a template to your account, so the recipes you buy stay attached to it, the image is kept with that template until you delete it. The template is yours to paint and Trycolors does not claim rights over the painting you make from it, and you should make sure you have the rights to the image you upload.