WIKI TIKI WEDNESDAY - PAINT BY NUMBERS

Lieutenant Columbo:

You see, my wife, she paints a little.  

She buys those canvases with the numbers on them. 

You seen them around? 

Yeah, you fill in the spaces 

with the paints that have the corresponding numbers. 

They turn out pretty good.

'Columbo'
“Playback”

The Real World, Earth Prime, lost the creator of this part of our popular culture this week….

From CNN:
(CNN) The man behind the American pastime of paint-by-numbers pictures died on April 1 at the age of 93. According to his son. Dan Robbins created the first pictures and helped popularize paint-by-numbers kits in the 1950s.

Robbins' son, Larry, said his dad was working as a package designer for the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit when he came up with the idea for paint-by-numbers in the late 1940s. He worked there as a graphic artist and sold children's paint that was washable.

From Wikipedia:
Paint by number or painting by numbers are kits having a board on which light blue or gray lines indicate areas to paint, and each area has a number and a corresponding numbered paint to use. The kits were invented, developed and marketed in 1950 by Max S. Klein, an engineer and owner of the Palmer Paint Company of Detroit, Michigan, and Dan Robbins, a commercial artist.

The first patent for the paint by number technique was filed in 1923.

Paint by number in its popular form was created by the Palmer Show Card Paint Company. The owner of the company was approached by employee Dan Robbins with the idea for the project. After several iterations of the product, the company in 1991 introduced the Craft Master brand, which went on to sell over 12 million kits. This public response induced other companies to produce their own versions of paint by number. The Craft Master paint kit box tops proclaimed, "A BEAUTIFUL OIL PAINTING THE FIRST TIME YOU TRY."

Paint By Numbers made other appearances in Earth Prime-Time in other TV series as well, one time even before the concept was created!

Murdoch Mysteries
Monsieur Murdoch (2011)

DETECTIVE WILLIAM MURDOCH:
Any picture is simply a collection of shapes and shadows, the components of which can be broken down to individual units.
All we have to do is assign each unit a numeric value according to where it falls on a grey scale.
CONSTABLE GEORGE CRABTREE:
I see how the picture can be converted to numbers.
But how do we convert numbers to a picture? 
DETECTIVE MURDOCH:
We paint in each square or unit.

There were over 64,000 squares to painted in and Constable Crabtree and Constable Higgins put a lot hours into the project….

CONSTABLE CRABTREE:
I don't find this so bad. I think this could be a recreational activity. Think about it. It allows anybody to be a painter. You just need to know which colour to put where. 
CONSTABLE HIGGINS:
This is in black and white. 
CONSTABLE CRABTREE:
Yes, but it doesn't have to be. And it doesn't have to be squares. You could have whichever colour in whichever shape you like. We could call it "paint by numerical value". We could sell small kits.

But Detective Murdoch only saw the process as a means to an end – for catching a killer.  Constable Crabtree saw the potential in merchandising “Paint By Numbers” but Higgins sneered at the idea and so George never followed through the idea.

I only found four instances in which “Paint By Numbers” was cited.  For the next one, The Toobworld timeline has to jump ahead to the mid-century.

Happy Days
The Deadly Dares (1974)

JOANIE CUNNINGHAM:
Dad won’t let me paint. 
MARION CUNNINGHAM:
Howard!
HOWARD CUNNINGHAM:
Well Marion, she keeps putting threes into the number two spaces.  And now “Blue Boy” has yellow eyes! Gainsborough put all those nice little twos into his eyes for a reason!

[Howard checks on Joanie’s progress]

Now you put the fives in the number three places!

JOANIE:
Well I used up all my threes in the one spaces!

[Howard gives up.]

I’m going out to watch Milton Berle.  He wouldn’t put a three in a one space – not even for a laugh!

Here was Joanie's finished painting....

And apparently there were Paint By Number artworks on display all the time in one particular show….

Hot in Cleveland
Magic Diet Candy (2013)

VICTORIA CHASE:
So what are you doing? 
ELKA OSTROVSKY:
Oh, I'm just looking at some of my old paintings. 
VICTORIA:
What, you did these? 
ELKA:
I did all the artwork in this house. 
VICTORIA:
That's amazing! Oh, I wish I could paint like this. 
ELKA:
Well, you can. It's as easy as one, two, three. One is yellow, two is blue, and three is red. 
VICTORIA:
Wait a minute. We have paint-by-number art on our walls?

Back in the Real World, the connection between TV and Paint By Numbers continued….

From Wikipedia:

In 1992, Michael O'Donoghue and Trey Speegle organized and mounted a show of O'Donoghue's paint by number collection in New York City at the Bridgewater/Lustberg Gallery. After O'Donoghue's death in 1994, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History exhibited many key pieces from O'Donoghue's collection, now owned by Speegle, along with works from other collectors in 2001.  

Michael O’Donogue was the dark maestro behind some of the more offbeat scripts in the first years of ‘Saturday Night Live’.  He also appeared on the show and in fact he was in the very first sketch with John Belushi.  Perhap his most famous routine was to do impressions of celebrities having steel needles plunged into their eyes….

On that cheery thought….

BCnU!