Hummingbird Diamond Painting Kit: A Craft Table Story

I have finished somewhere around forty diamond painting canvases in four years, and every single one of them was a landscape or a flower. I knew exactly what I was doing. Green trees, pink peonies, nothing that required me to think about feathers. So when I say the SHICERNHJ hummingbird kit was the first bird I ever attempted, understand that I had been avoiding birds on purpose.

My right thumb has mild arthritis in it, and knitting is what put me at this craft table in the first place. Small, tight, repetitive work is the thing I have to be careful about. Feathers are exactly that kind of work. I put off this canvas for a month before I opened the box.

Here is what made me finally start it: the kit is 14 x 14 inches, which fits my folding table in the spare bedroom without spilling over the edge onto the floor. Big canvases go to the kitchen table and I have to move them for dinner. This one stayed put. That sounds like a small thing. If you have ever carried a half-finished canvas across a house, you know it is not.

The SHICERNHJ box came with the printed canvas, one diamond pen, one tray, a pot of solid clay, ten plastic bags, and the drills. More than thirty percent extra drills, according to the listing, and I believe it, because I finished the hummingbird with a comfortable pile left in every color. The canvas itself is the 13.8 inch square, the 5D full drill sort, with the symbols printed under a sticky surface. Each drill has twenty-six facets. I did not count them. I did notice, once it was framed and hanging in the hallway, that the light moves across it in a way my flatter-looking kits never did.

I finished the whole bird with extra drills left in every single color, which is the only kind of insurance that matters when you are one bead short at ten at night.

I did not use the pen that came in the box. My Praise V Do pen with the larger grip has been my pen for about a year now, ever since the thin plastic stock pens started making my thumb ache after half an hour. That is not a knock on the SHICERNHJ pen. It is a fact about my hand. If your hands are fine, the included pen will do the job, and the tray and the clay that came with it are the same shapes I use anyway.

What I did use was my ARTDOT light pad, slid under the canvas on the folding table. The symbols on this chart are small and close together in the wing areas, and under the ceiling light alone I would have been squinting by seven in the evening. With the pad on, the symbols came up clear and my reading glasses stayed on my face instead of getting pushed up on my head every few minutes.

I worked roughly an hour a night for three weeks. Not every night. Some nights I did a wing and quit, because the wing sections are where the color changes come fast and you have to actually pay attention. The background went quickly. I sorted the drills into my ARTDOT storage box before I started, which took most of one evening, and then I never had to hunt for a color again. If you keep your drills in bags in a shoebox, do yourself the favor. I learned that the hard way with two similar greens and an evening on my knees on the rug.

When the last section was filled, I rolled the whole canvas with my EastyGold roller to seat the drills flat, the same as I do with every piece before it gets framed. Then it went into a simple narrow frame and up on the hallway wall, where my husband Ray has walked past it roughly two hundred times and said something nice about it at least four of those times. That is high praise from Ray.

I want to be honest about the one part I did not love. The chart is dense. Twenty-six facets on small drills in a tight wing pattern means the finished piece has real depth, and it also means the working surface is busier than a landscape with big open sky. If you are brand new to this hobby, a simpler design with larger color blocks will teach you the technique with less frustration. My first canvas was a sunset with about nine colors. That was the right place to start. This hummingbird is a good second or fifth or fortieth canvas.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you that a bird is not as hard as it looks, but it is more demanding than a landscape, and you should know that going in. Feathers are dozens of tiny adjacent color changes, and adjacent color changes are where mistakes happen. On a landscape you can be careless in the sky. You cannot be careless in a wing.

I would tell you to sort the drills first. All of them, into something with slots, before you peel any canvas. It takes an evening and it saves you a dozen small interruptions later, and interruptions are what make me place a bead in the wrong square.

I would tell you to get the light right. Under a good pad the symbols on this chart are easy. Under a dim ceiling fixture they are a chore, and a chore you are doing for three weeks is a chore that ends up in a drawer.

And I would tell you the thing I tell everybody at this table: use your good pen if you have one. The SHICERNHJ kit is generous with what it includes, and the drills are the reason to buy it, not the pen. Bring your own grip and your own light and your own roller, and let the canvas be the star. That is what I did, and I have a hummingbird in my hallway to show for it.