How to Download and Print a Blank Paint-by-Numbers Canvas

Wabihana is built for painting on screen, but sometimes you want the thing in your hands — a printed outline you can fill in with real acrylics, hang on the fridge, or hand to a child at the kitchen table. That’s what the blank canvas download is for: it exports your painting as the bare numbered outline, ready to print on ordinary paper. This guide covers how to download it, which format and paper size to choose, what the paint-mixing guide gives you, and how to get a clean print.

What a “blank canvas” actually is

The blank canvas is your painting with the paint taken away: the black region outlines and the little grey numbers, on white, with a colour key. It’s the same numbered map you paint on screen, laid out for a printer instead of a display. Nothing is filled in — that’s the point. You (or whoever you’re printing it for) provide the colour, matching each number to the palette on the key.

It is a file, and only a file. We don’t sell or post paints, brushes or pre-printed canvas, so everything after the download is yours to arrange. There’s a fuller tour of what lands in the file on the printable canvas page.

How to download it

The blank canvas comes from any painting already in your gallery, so convert your photo first if you haven’t. Then:

• Open your gallery and find the painting you want to print.
• Tap the ⋮ menu on its tile and choose “Download blank”.
• Pick a format (PDF, PNG or SVG) and a paper size (A5, A4, A3 or A2), then download.

The file saves ready to print, with a separate palette page so you always know which number is which colour. Two things worth knowing before you go looking for the button: it appears only once a painting is finished generating, not while you’re still previewing it, and it lives in the web app rather than the mobile apps.

PDF, PNG or SVG?

For almost everyone, choose PDF. It’s laid out to the exact paper size with sensible margins and a dedicated palette page, so it prints correctly without any fiddling — open it and hit print. It is also the only format that carries the paint-mixing guide.

Pick PNG if you want the raw image — to drop into a document, resize it yourself, or send it somewhere that can’t take a PDF. It’s a single high-resolution image with no page layout, so you’re in charge of scaling it to the paper.

SVG is the vector option. It has no resolution at all, so the same file prints crisply at postcard size or at poster size, and it opens in a drawing program or a cutting machine. The artwork, the colour key and the numbers sit on separate layers, so you can delete the legend in one click, or cut the outlines in vinyl and never print them at all.

Paper size: bigger sheet, bigger regions

The paper size decides how physically large each numbered region is. Detailed paintings pack a lot of small zones into the sheet, and on a small sheet those zones — and their numbers — get too small to paint comfortably. Stepping up a size roughly doubles the area, so every zone and number gets easier to work with.

You do not need a large-format printer for the big sizes. Every page we produce is A4, so an A3 canvas prints as two A4 sheets and an A2 canvas as four, and you tape them together along the edges. A5 goes the other way: one small sheet, good for children and for something you can finish in a single sitting.

The paint-mixing guide

Switch the mixing guide on (it’s on by default, and PDF only) and the palette page stops being a row of swatches and becomes a recipe sheet. Every colour in the painting is rewritten as a mix of a small set of tubes: for each one you get its swatch, its number, how much of the painting it covers, and the recipe itself — something like Titanium White 96% + Ultramarine Blue 4%. A colour the set can’t quite reach is marked with ≈, which means mix it and then adjust by eye.

You choose the set: 6, 12 or 18 tubes. A bigger set buys you closer matches on a handful of awkward colours and slightly shorter recipes; it does not turn into a different painting, so the six-tube set is a perfectly reasonable place to start. The last sheet prints a shopping list of exactly the paints the recipes call for, each with the pigment code from the tube — PW6, PY35, PB29. Those codes are printed on the tube by every manufacturer, so the list works at any brand and any price. If you want more on choosing and handling the paint itself, see choosing and mixing paints.

Painting on canvas instead of paper

If you’d rather paint on a real stretched canvas, the printout becomes your template — trace it through graphite paper, grid it up, or project it. There’s a whole guide on how to transfer the outline from paper to canvas.

One option lives in the download dialog itself. Turn on Mirror and the artwork is flipped horizontally, which is what you want for an iron-on transfer: printed back-to-front, it lands the right way round once you press it onto the fabric or canvas. The palette page stays unmirrored, since you read it rather than transfer it, and the file name gains a -mirror suffix so you don’t confuse the two copies later.

Getting a clean print

A blank canvas is only as good as the print, and a couple of printer settings make all the difference.

If you’re painting the printout with real acrylics or gouache, heavier paper (or a light card) keeps it flat and stops the colour bleeding through. For pencils or markers, ordinary printer paper is fine.

What to do with it

A printed blank canvas is a surprisingly flexible thing. It’s a screen break that keeps the same painting going on paper; a ready-made activity for kids or a group, where everyone paints their own copy; and a lovely low-cost gift — print a portrait of someone’s pet, add a little set of paints, and you’ve made something personal. We talk more about that in the custom gift guide, and about the wider trade-offs of paper versus screen in digital vs physical paint by numbers.

The one thing to plan ahead: detailed paintings that shine on screen can be fiddly on paper, because zoom doesn’t exist off the display. If you know you’ll print, a lower detail level makes a friendlier canvas — see how color count changes difficulty. Otherwise, turn a photo into a painting first, then grab its blank canvas whenever you want to take it off the screen.