Wabihana
Find calm in colour

Free online paint by numbers, from your own photos.

Drop a photo in and we'll turn it into a relaxing paint-by-number scene you colour one numbered zone at a time. No install, nothing to learn.

See how it works
✓Your photos stay private✓No ads while painting✓Made without AI✓2,000 credits to start
Also on iPhone and AndroidDownload on theApp StoreGet it onGoogle Play

Start a new painting

Medium~ 1,800 zones · 64 colours
Drop a photo here, or browse
JPEG, PNG or WebP · up to 25 MB · ⌘V
Estimated cost
you only pay for detail delivered
434credits

How it works

four taps to calm
1
Pick a difficulty
Choose how many numbered zones — from sketchy to insane detail.
2
Upload a photo
A pet, a place, a person. Drop it in or paste from your clipboard.
3
Tap zones to fill
We generate the scene in seconds. Colour one zone at a time.
4
Keep — privately
Your paintings stay on your device, yours to return to anytime.
Real-time co-op

Paint together, on one canvas

Start a painting, share a code, and fill the same canvas with friends — every tap appears live. Up to six painters, free to join.

Live, not turn-basedEveryone paints at once and sees each fill the instant it lands.
Up to six paintersHost a quiet pair or a full table — the canvas keeps everyone in sync.
Any deviceBrowser, iPhone, or Android — phone or laptop, mix and match in one room.
See how co-op works
Print at home

Take the canvas off the screen.

Every painting can be downloaded as a printable blank canvas: the numbered outline, a colour key, and a guide to mixing each colour from a handful of tubes.

  • PDF, PNG or SVG, from A5 to A2
  • Big sizes print as A4 sheets you tape together
  • Free with any painting, no watermark
See how printing worksRead the step-by-step guide
A printed blank canvas: black outlines with small grey numbers, and a colour key underneath.
No AI

Your photo, not a machine's guess.

Wabihana turns a photo into numbered zones with plain image processing: colour quantization and region detection. Nothing is reimagined or repainted, so the same photo always gives the same canvas.

input
your photo
method
colour quantization + region detection
model
none
output
the same canvas, every time
  • Every colour on the canvas is sampled from your own pixels
  • Nothing is invented: no faces redrawn, no details made up
  • Your photo is never used to train a model, ours or anyone's
See how a photo becomes a canvas
Free paint

Any zone, any colour.

The numbers are a suggestion. Every painting has a free-paint mode: tap any zone and fill it with whatever colour you like.

  • The piece's own palette plus 18 base paints, free for everyone
  • Keeps its own progress, so your paint-by-number is never touched
  • Pro mixes any shade and saves a palette per piece
Try it on a demo painting
Four things Wabihana refuses to do, even when they would grow the numbers.

Designed to be left alone with.

Your photos stay yours
Processed for your painting and deleted from servers when done. Never used to train models.
No timers, no streaks
The daily credit bonus is a gift if you come back — it doesn't punish you if you don't.
Never ads while painting
Banners only on home and gallery, never on the canvas. Pro removes every surface.
Free forever, once made
Once a scene is generated, it lives in your gallery forever. Pause for a year if you want.

Paint by numbers, from your own photos

Answers to common questions about the app.

QWhat is Wabihana?
Wabihana turns any photo into a custom paint-by-numbers you color online, one numbered zone at a time. Upload a picture and we generate a relaxing paint-by-number scene from it in seconds.
QCan I make a paint by numbers from my own photo?
Yes — that's the whole idea. Drop in a photo of a pet, a place, or someone you love and Wabihana builds a personalized paint-by-numbers you can color on the web, iPhone, or Android.
QIs Wabihana free?
Yes. You start with free credits plus a daily bonus, so you can paint without paying. Pro and one-time credit packs unlock bigger, higher-detail canvases.
QDo I need to install an app?
No — Wabihana runs in your browser with nothing to install. There are also iPhone and Android apps if you prefer, and your paintings sync once you sign in.
QAre my photos private?
Yes. Your photos are processed only to build your painting and deleted from our servers afterwards. They're never sold or used to train AI models.
QCan I print my paint-by-number?
Yes. Once a scene is generated you can download a blank numbered canvas as a printable PDF — all the zones and colour numbers, ready to print and paint by hand with physical paints, pencils, or markers.
QDoes Wabihana use AI to make the painting?
No. The conversion is deterministic image processing, colour quantization plus region detection, not a generative AI or machine-learning model. The same photo at the same settings always produces the same canvas, and your photos are never used to train any model.
QDo I have to use the numbered colours?
No. Every painting has a free-paint mode where you fill any zone with any colour. The piece's own palette and 18 base paints are free for everyone, and Pro lets you mix your own shades. Free paint keeps its own progress, so your paint-by-number is never touched.

About paint by numbers

Paint by numbers breaks any image into numbered zones, each mapped to a colour. You fill them in one at a time — no artistic skill required, just patience and the quiet satisfaction of watching something take shape. The format has been around since the 1950s, but doing it from your own photos makes it personal in a way no kit ever could.

A pet portrait, a favourite holiday snap, a photo of someone you've lost — turning it into a painting you colour yourself is slower and more deliberate than scrolling past it. That's the point.

How Wabihana generates your scene

When you upload a photo, Wabihana analyses it and segments it into colour regions. Each region gets a number, a colour, and a boundary. The difficulty setting controls how finely the image is divided: Sketchy mode produces broad, impressionistic zones; Hard and Insane detail modes preserve fine edges and subtle gradients for a longer, more absorbing session. The whole process takes a few seconds. Your photo is used only to build the scene and is deleted from our servers once it's done. Once your scene is generated, you can also download a blank numbered canvas as a printable PDF — all the zones and numbers, no colour filled in. Print it out and paint it the traditional way with physical paints, coloured pencils, or markers.

Choosing the best photo

Wabihana turns your photo into numbered colour zones, so the pictures that convert best are the ones with clear shapes and clean colour. A few quick checks before you upload:

Lighting
Bright, even, natural light works best. Avoid harsh shadows, strong backlight, and dim indoor shots — they flatten the colours we build the scene from.
Sharpness
Use an in-focus shot. Motion blur and soft focus smear the edges between zones, so the painting loses its crispness.
Contrast
Clear separation between the subject and its surroundings makes distinct zones. Very flat, low-contrast images give zones that are hard to tell apart.
Backgrounds
Simple, uncluttered backgrounds keep the detail on your subject. Busy backgrounds get carved into lots of tiny, fiddly zones.
Resolution
Upload the largest copy you have — at least 1000px on the long side. Small or heavily compressed images can't hold fine detail. JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 25 MB.

What works by subject

Portraits
Face the light, fill the frame, keep the background plain. One clearly-lit face paints beautifully; tiny or shadowed faces don't.
Pets
Shoot at their eye level in daylight. A pet that stands out from the floor or grass behind it gives the cleanest zones.
Landscapes
A defined horizon and one clear focal point — a tree, a building, a peak — beat a hazy view where detail is spread everywhere.
Family photos
Choose a frame where faces are well-lit and not too small. A tight crop on two or three people works better than a distant crowd.

Common mistakes to avoid

  • Dark or night-time photos — too little colour for the scene to divide.
  • Screenshots or photos of a screen — moiré patterns and compression confuse the zones.
  • Heavy filters, text, or stickers — they fight the colour detection.
  • Far-away or tightly-cropped subjects — too few pixels to keep detail.
  • Cluttered backgrounds — the detail gets spent on the wrong thing.

Not sure? Upload it anyway — re-generating at a different difficulty is free, and each level produces a genuinely different scene.

Wabi-sabi, and where our name comes from

the name

Wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a Japanese way of seeing that finds beauty in things that are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Wabi is the quiet grace of simplicity and the unforced; sabi is the beauty that time leaves behind — the patina, the weathering, the marks of a thing having been lived with. Together they teach a gentle kind of attention: notice the cracked glaze, the uneven edge, the single off-centre bloom, and let it be enough.

It's the opposite of polished perfection. A wabi-sabi object doesn't ask to be admired; it asks to be sat with.

Imperfection
Beauty doesn't need to be flawless. A slightly crooked line or an uneven fill is part of the charm, not a mistake to fix.
Impermanence
Nothing lasts, and that's part of what makes it precious. A painting made slowly, one zone at a time, holds the hours you gave it.
Simplicity
Less, but better. Quiet colour, room to breathe, and nothing competing for your attention.

How it shapes Wabihana

Our name joins wabi (侘) with hana (花), the Japanese word for flower — Wabihana is "the flower of wabi-sabi," a small bloom that's beautiful precisely because it's unhurried and a little imperfect. That idea runs through the whole app. There are no timers, no streaks, and no pressure to be perfect — just you, a photo, and one numbered zone at a time. Your painting grows at your own pace, edges and all, and stays yours to return to. Finding calm in colour is wabi-sabi, quietly put to work.

Free forever, once made.

Once a scene is generated it lives in your gallery forever. Pause for a year if you want — it'll be waiting.

Upload your first photo
Free Online Paint by Numbers From Your Photos — Wabihana