Abstract Sunset Color by Number Kit • Alcohol Marker, Colored Pencil PDF

a printable color by number kit of a painterly wash of sunset colour: gold and butter yellow burning through coral and hot pink into deep violet. no subject, no edges, just colour doing what it wants. 👋

this one is the odd one out, and the most satisfying to fill in. it has the most colours in the shop, 30, but the fewest pieces of any kit, 304, because the shapes are big soft drifts rather than detail. you cover ground fast.

one person makes these. I pick the picture, set the kit up by hand, run it through software I wrote, and read every page before it ships.

built for the alcohol markers and coloured pencils you already own, and this kit does the matching for you. every colour in it is matched to the closest colour in four standard sets: ohuhu 320, copic, prismacolor premier and faber-castell polychromos, by code and by name. 30 of the 30 colours have a close match in ohuhu, 24 in copic, 30 in prismacolor, 29 in polychromos. where nothing comes close, the card says so instead of pretending.

the reference behind that is measured, not copied off a chart: 797 of the 947 colours in those four sets come from real hand swatches, blended from nine independent swatch sets and checked against each maker's own chart. hex and RGB are on the card too, so anything else in your cup still works.

THE NUMBERS (so you know before you buy)

• 30 colours · 304 pieces · 87 pages

• the art prints 10 x 8 in, centred on an 11 x 8.5 in page, which is US Letter. print at 100%, not fit-to-page, and it comes out true to size on the paper you already have

• 28 of those 304 pieces are smaller than a size-0 brush tip, so you'll want your finest nib or a sharp pencil for those. I'd rather tell you now.

if you own a lot of markers and have been looking for something to actually use the pinks and purples on, this is it. and because it's abstract, there's no likeness to get wrong: nothing here can look wonky.

the small pieces are all in the blend edges where one colour hands over to the next. skip them, blend over them, or pick them out with a fineliner. all three look good.

WHAT YOU GET (87 printable pages, 5 PDFs)

• eighteen outlines to choose from, four darknesses, each one plain or numbered, with or without the colour bar. print the faintest plain one and no lines or numbers show in your finished piece.

• eight of those outlines carry the colour bar along the top: the whole palette printed right on the page, so you can work straight from the outline without the swatch card beside you.

• the last two outlines are laid over a 1-inch grid, so you can copy the design onto canvas or a sketchbook by hand instead of printing it.

• the swatch card: all 30 colours with hex and RGB, printed as true 1-inch squares so you can swatch your own markers straight onto it. then 4 more pages naming the closest ohuhu, copic, prismacolor and polychromos for every single colour.

• the colour-by-colour guide, one page per colour, that colour alone on the page.

• the build-up guide, one page per colour, the whole picture as it grows, with only the colour that page adds numbered on it. no hunting for which shape is new.

• the finished preview, plus a copy with the numbers printed on the colours.

there are free tools that will trace a photo into numbered shapes. this is not that. this is eighteen outlines to choose from, a page per colour, the piece count and the small-piece warning in writing before you pay, and a swatch card that names the marker to reach for.

this one is the most forgiving. the other six premade kits are deliberately different evenings: kiwi is the easiest start, citrus is the sunniest, cappy is the softest, mushrooms is the calm one, fresh is the brightest, cozy is the longest.

nothing to mix, no water, no brushes to wash. print it and uncap a marker.

instant download: your files are ready the moment you order, nothing ships, so nothing is two weeks away. you can print it tonight.

MADE BY MEGAN (and what that means here)

• I choose the picture and check it will survive being cut into flat colours before I build anything.

• I set it up myself. every kit is tuned by hand: how many colours, how fine the detail, how dark the lines print, which two colours to merge when nothing could tell them apart.

• it runs on software I wrote. not an app I bought and not a website: I built it in python and I keep fixing it, kit after kit.

• then I read it. all 87 pages of this one, before it goes anywhere.

so yes: the tracing and the numbering are computer-assisted, by a program I wrote and keep fixing. then I check and finish every kit by hand before it goes in the shop. I teach high school maths. after school I make these, one picture at a time.