In for the count!

Not just in front of the children: Someone invents a pastime for the kiddies that enchants the grown-ups, and then it goes back to the kids. That, in a word, is the story of "Painting-by-Number", an indissoluble part of the life story of Jürgen Schipper. Portrait of a brand and its creator.

Unresting: Jürgen Schipper designing a new outline.

Folk have been known to sneer at Painting-by-Number: it’s all done for you, there’s no creativity in-volved, it isn’t art, and you can tell it from the real thing a mile off. But who has a real Leonardo or van Gogh in their living room anyway? The people who snicker are generally the sort who can’t hammer in a nail or sew on a button, let alone arrange a vase of flowers.

As a matter of fact, people who paint by numbers don’t generally see themselves as artists. They just enjoy a bit of quiet quality time and the  satisfaction of making something with their own hands. To them, the means is the end. It may take up to thirty hours to complete a picture  roughly eight inches high by six wide. Something really elaborate, such as a triptych, may take anything up to fifty hours.

Topseller: line of elephants as a trptych

Field work
It starts with a few patches of color that don’t look like anything in particular. But every careful brush-stroke makes you more curious to see  how the picture will come out. Naturally, you won’t get a good end result unless you have a good model. Something of the quality offered by  Schipper Arts & Crafts, a member of the Simba Dickie Group since 2008.

For the benefit of readers who’ve never met with paintby-numbers, here‘s the deal: You buy a set comprising a canvas, paintbrushes, and  paints. The canvas is white, with the picture in outline. Every unit of color has a number, which corresponds to the shade you need to fill in. The more detailed the subject, the harder it is to make out the tangle of numbers and lines.

Light energy: Everything in the factory has to be just the right shade.

And that’s precisely what makes it so fascinating. Schipper, a native of Fürth, discovered Walt Disney’s painting system in a New York toy store. It was a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s world-famous Last Supper. "I was hooked straight off," says Schipper, who still includes this  masterpiece in his product list. 

Where there’s a will …
Schipper, himself a toymaker’s son, started developing his first subject, "The Four Seasons," as soon as he got back from the US. He found some suitable draughtsmen, put together oil paints and went into production. But the German market was not quite ready for him. "Dealers  wouldn’t look at it," he says, recalling his first fumbling attempts at marketing. It was kid’s stuff, they said, with no adult appeal. But Schipper never lost faith in his system, and finally managed to win over the department store chain Karstadt.

His children’s mini-pictures were soon selling like hot cakes at discount grocers’ stores. Then – surprise! "Adults started going into toyshops and asking for Painting-by-Number – for themselves. It was really a customer-led thing," explains Schipper. "Dealers just couldn’t  keep up with the demand – and it didn’t let up." It wasn’t so much the kiddies who wanted ‘Painting-by-Number’, it was their elder brothers and sisters – and parents and grandparents. And they got it.

Color basics: The eight basic water colors in large vats, prior to mixing, before they end up on the pot-filling machine.

Unerring trendsetter
As the years went by, Schipper steadily refined his painting technique. 1997 he changed to odor-free, color-fast, water-based acrylic paints. "Latch on to a trend and develop it quick" was and remains his watchword. Whatever people are particularly interested in, that’s the thing to go for. At one time the favorites were religious subjects: good shepherds, guardian angels, frescos, the sort of thing people purchased as prints to hang on the wall. Another perennial favorite is ancient Egypt; yet another, exotic décor subjects with an "out of Africa" look. Flower paintings and landscapes of all kinds and colors always go well. In Northern Europe, that is. The big Painting-by-Number enthusiasts are mostly to be found in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Glorious technicolor: An employee fills tiny paint pots.

All done by hand
Over the last twenty-five years, Schipper has sold about 2.5 million pictures. His portfolio now includes 120 subjects, of which 85% are aimed at adults. But the children’s share is growing. Every year he adds from six to eight new model pictures. This process has always been an intricate one.

Whether he’s copying an existing original or developing a new subject, Schipper starts by describing his idea in words and sketches for the benefit of the illustrator. After a long series of drafts and a number of corrections, the artist prepares the final model and establishes the color fields and outlines. He decides the colors – which are of course dictated by the original. The more colors, the more outlines, the closer the Painting-by-Number version will be to the original. A six-by-eight-inch painting will contain 800-1,000 outlines. The simplest color palette comprises six colors; the most professional version has no fewer than 42. Just settling the palette can take up to six weeks. And it’s all done by hand, as it has always been. Computers only come in when the background is mass-produced. Painting-by-Number fans attach as much importance to precise, finely drawn outlines as they do to legible numbers.

Know your colors
The artist uses his palette to mix color shades. The Nuremberg factory (215,000 square feet) houses thousands of tubs containing all the world’s colors: it’s like being inside a gigantic paint box. They use a total of 5,000 different shades; six to eight of them might be blended just to achieve a particular kind of lemon yellow. And it’s all made in Germany. Only the cotton for the canvases comes from the Far East.

In the mid-1990s, Schipper came up with a completely new idea that really caught on: "Paint Your Partner." Customers were invited to send in a black-and-white photo for conversion into a painting kit. Schipper applied for a patent for his invention. Businessman he may be, but he takes creativity very much to heart, as this further example shows: every kit based on an original includes a leaflet with information about the original work, including the artist, the date and location of the painting, etc. "Just a bit of art education," grins Schipper.

The firm employs 24 people, most of them trained by Schipper in person. Some of them run the firm’s unique replacement paint service: Painting-by-Number aficionados who’ve left off working on a painting for a while often find that their paints have dried up, or else they spill  some by mistake. No problem: They just phone the firm and in a few hours’ time the replacement pots will be on their way.

Masterpiece: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in six-by-eight inch mode.

A smile – a masterpiece
Schipper’s creativity is inexhaustible. His latest master stroke is the customized frame, fine-tuned to tone with the painting. The frames are supplied by the Simba Dickie firm Eichhorn and are made of pinewood and assembled ready for use. Purchasers can design their own finish: stripped or goldbronze, bees-wax or shoe-polish through to gold leaf. The current favorites are the antique look and the old gold finish.

To show the world what can be done with Painting-by-Number, Schipper took his latest creative highlight beginning of the year: the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), the world’s most famous painting, now in the Louvre. "My masterpiece," says Schipper with a subtle smile. "This is really painting by number – to perfection."

The team: Jürgen Schipper with his sales staff, (l. to r.) Alexander Singh, Christian Fackelmann, and Sebastian Hoffmann.