A Short History of Paint by Number, from 1950s Kits to Apps

Few hobbies have a beginning as easy to point to as paint by number. The idea of a picture divided into outlined areas, each marked with a number that matches a pot of paint, became a national craze in the United States in the early 1950s. It was mocked, collected, argued over, and eventually welcomed into museums. Today the same basic idea lives on in phones and web browsers, including daubday.

A paint company looks for customers

The story usually starts with the Palmer Paint Company of Detroit, Michigan, a firm run by Max Klein that made paints and other art supplies. Klein wanted more people to buy paint, and that meant finding people who did not already think of themselves as painters.

Dan Robbins, a commercial artist working for the company, came up with the answer. He drew pictures, broke them into small shapes, and numbered each shape to match a specific color. Robbins later said he was inspired by the idea that Renaissance masters, Leonardo da Vinci among them, had given apprentices numbered patterns to fill in. That account has been repeated many times, but it is better read as the inventor's own origin story than as established art history.

The first kits did not sell well. Early designs were reportedly too abstract for buyers who wanted something recognizable to hang on the wall. The company shifted toward familiar subjects, and the line, sold under the Craft Master name, took off:

• Landscapes with mountains, lakes, and cabins
• Animals, especially horses, dogs, and birds
• Still lifes of flowers and fruit
• Religious scenes, including versions of well-known paintings

By the middle of the decade paint-by-number kits were everywhere, and many competing companies sold their own versions. The finished paintings filled living rooms and offices across the country.

Was it real art?

Almost from the start, paint by number drew criticism. Detractors saw it as the opposite of what art was supposed to be: no original composition, no personal choice of color, no risk. To them the kits stood for a culture of conformity, where everyone painted the same mountain lake in the same blue.

Supporters answered that the kits were never meant to replace painting. For many people they were a first encounter with a brush, a way to learn how colors sit next to each other and how a flat outline turns into a scene. Plenty of hobbyists also ignored the rules, mixing their own shades or adding details the designer never drew.

The argument never really ended, but its tone changed over time. Artists began to use paint by number as a subject in its own right. Andy Warhol, for example, made paintings in the early 1960s that copied the look of unfinished kits, with numbers still showing in empty areas. Later, collectors started seeking out vintage Craft Master paintings, and in 2001 the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History held an exhibition about the craze. The question shifted from whether the paintings were art to what they said about the people who made them.

From canvas board to screen

The essential idea of paint by number turned out to be easy to move. A picture split into numbered areas is really a set of shapes and a palette, which is exactly the kind of thing a computer handles well. When smartphones and tablets became common, color-by-number apps followed, replacing brushes with taps.

The screen changed some of the experience and kept the rest:

• There is no paint to mix, spill, or dry, and no limit on how many pictures you can start.
• Zooming makes tiny areas manageable in a way a canvas board never could.
• A mistake costs nothing, because a wrong tap can simply be ignored or undone.
• What remains is the core pleasure the 1950s kits offered: watching a picture appear one color at a time.

Where daubday fits

daubday is a small, free, browser-based take on this long tradition. Two things set its approach apart from a box of identical kits.

First, there is a single picture of the day that changes at midnight Korea time and is the same for everyone. In a way this echoes the shared experience of the 1950s, when thousands of people painted the same scene, but here it resets each day rather than sitting on a shelf.

Second, you can turn your own photo into a puzzle at the upload page. The photo is processed on your device and never uploaded. This answers, in a modest way, one of the oldest complaints about paint by number: that the pictures were always someone else's. When the outline comes from your own photo, the result is at least partly yours.

The gallery also generates pictures from a seed, so each of its 16 themes has many variations at different difficulty levels instead of one fixed design. If you want to try it, the gallery is a good place to start, and you can decide for yourself whether the old debate about real art still matters.