Which colour should you fill first?
Five orders people actually use, and what each one costs. There is no correct answer here — the choice is aesthetic rather than optimal, and it is worth saying so plainly.
You open a picture, a row of numbered colours sits along the bottom, and there is a small unnecessary pause before the first tap. Nothing is riding on the answer, which is exactly why the question is annoying: there is no reason to think about it and yet here you are, thinking about it.
These are the five orders people actually use, and what each one does to the experience. None of them is correct.
Numeric order
Start at one and work upwards. The advantage is that no decision is required at any point, including this one, and no colour ever gets skipped or forgotten. If the palette is arranged sensibly — many are ordered by lightness or grouped by hue — consecutive numbers will also be related colours, so the picture builds in coherent passes rather than jumping about.
The cost is that the image emerges in an arbitrary order. You may spend the first three colours placing scattered highlights that mean nothing until much later. For anyone who enjoys watching a picture resolve, this is the least satisfying route on the list; for anyone who wants to stop making decisions, it is the best one.
Largest areas first
Pick the colour covering the most ground and lay it down, then the next largest. The picture takes recognisable shape within a few minutes, which is genuinely motivating on a big or intimidating artwork — you go from a field of outlines to something you can see very quickly.
The cost arrives at the end. You have deliberately deferred every small, fiddly, hard-to-find region to the point where you are least fresh. The final fifth will be slower and more frustrating than it would have been in any other order, and it is where pictures get abandoned.
One practical wrinkle: you cannot reliably tell which colour covers most ground by eye. A colour with three enormous regions and one with two hundred tiny ones can look similar in the palette. If the app shows a per-colour count, remember that a count is regions, not area, and the two are very different quantities.
Darkest first
Fill the darkest colours before the light ones. This is the only order on the list with an argument behind it that is not purely taste.
Dark fills against a pale uncoloured ground are the highest-contrast marks you can make, so they show up strongly and give you landmarks. Once the darks are down the picture has a structure — the composition is effectively drawn — and later regions can be located by their relationship to those landmarks instead of by scanning empty outlines.
It also helps with the perceptual problem that light colours are the hardest to place, because a pale fill on a pale background is a low-contrast change that is easy to miss. Leaving them until the canvas is mostly filled means placing them into a context that makes them easier to see.
The cost is that the middle of the session can look muddy, and the picture stays visually unfinished until quite late.
Two more orders worth knowing
Most fragmented first
Find the colour with the most regions — usually a shading tone scattered across the whole image in slivers — and do it while your attention is fresh and your eyes have not already been at it for half an hour. Everything after it is downhill.
This is the exact inverse of largest-areas-first and it carries the inverse trade. The opening stretch is the hardest part of the session, which some people find discouraging enough to stop, and the picture stays illegible for a long time. But it front-loads the work that is genuinely demanding, and it means you never reach the state of having only the horrible bits left.
Whichever colour you like most
Start with the colour you want to touch. There is no strategy here and it does not need one. This is a pastime, the ordering has no consequences beyond the next half hour, and “I felt like doing the green” is a complete and sufficient reason.
That is worth stating plainly, because the other four entries can make the choice sound like an optimisation problem. It is not one. Nothing accumulates, nothing is scored, and a picture finished in a silly order is identical in every respect to one finished in a clever order.
If you want one recommendation
- On a picture you expect to enjoy and finish in a sitting or two: any order at all, including whichever colour you fancy first.
- On a large or dense picture you suspect you might abandon: darkest first, then the most fragmented colour, saving the big easy areas for when your attention is fading.
- On a picture where you keep losing track of what you have done: strict numeric order, which removes the bookkeeping entirely.
- If the palette contains two near-identical shades: finish one of them completely before starting the other, so the remaining one is identified by elimination rather than by comparison.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a correct order to fill the colours in?
No. The finished picture is identical whichever order you use, and the differences are all about how the session feels — how early the image becomes recognisable, and how hard the last stretch is. Treat it as a matter of taste, because that is what it is.
Why is darkest-first often recommended?
Two reasons. Dark fills on a pale ground are high contrast, so they give you landmarks early and make later regions easier to locate. And light colours are hardest to place on an empty canvas, so leaving them until the picture is mostly filled makes them easier to see going down.
Should I finish one colour completely before starting the next?
It is usually the least effortful approach, because switching colours costs a decision and re-orientation each time. Working a colour to completion also leaves the canvas in a tidy state, which makes resuming after a break much quicker.
Does the order change how long a picture takes?
Barely, in total. What it changes is the distribution: doing the fiddly colours first makes the opening slow and the ending easy, and doing the large areas first does the reverse. The main practical effect is on whether you finish at all.
Try it on a real canvas
Numbrush is colour by number for adults: mandalas, rose windows and geometric pattern work, twelve colours a picture, a magnifier for the tight spots, and a wrong tap that costs you nothing. Free, offline, no ads and no account.