8 years into Paint by Numbers and 48/60-color kits still drive me crazy 😂 How do you organize your paints?
I’ve been doing Paint by Numbers for about 8 years now. For the longest time, I mostly stuck with 24-color kits, and later 36-color ones. At that stage, everything felt pretty manageable — the paints didn’t take up too much space, and I never really thought much about storage or organization.
But over the past couple of years, I started getting into 48-color and even 60-color kits more often, and that’s when I started noticing something I hadn’t really dealt with before 😅
The bigger sets just change the whole setup.
My desk would slowly get taken over by paint pots, and things started feeling a lot more cluttered than I was used to. I’d be in the middle of painting and suddenly realize I had to stop just to find the right color number. And with so many shades now, some of them look so similar that I’d end up double-checking multiple pots before I even started painting.
It also got a bit messy in small but annoying ways — no real place for the paints to stay, constantly moving them around, and occasionally worrying about bumping them too close to the canvas. And somehow I’d still end up with paint on my hands more often than I liked, which made the whole process feel less relaxed than it used to be.
At some point I realized it wasn’t really the painting that was stressful — it was just the setup.
So recently I tried switching to a paint rack to keep everything more organized instead of spreading the paints all over the table. Having them upright and sorted by number made things a lot easier to manage. Less clutter, faster to find colors, and overall a much smoother painting process.
I got mine from 1001Canvas, but honestly this is more just what worked for me — I’m mostly curious how other people handle it.
If you’ve had similar struggles with bigger kits, I hope this helps a bit 🙂
And I’d really love to hear how you organize your paints — always looking for better ideas.