This is Amy Wagenaar from the Historical Society of Michigan with a Michigan History moment. They were and still are called paint by number kits and they originated in Michigan. The paint by number craze swept America in the years after the Second World War. The idea was simple. People bought a kit that included a board or canvas on which was printed a picture outlined in light blue or gray lines. Various areas of the picture bore numbers which corresponded to paint colors that were also included in the kit. The aspiring artists simply filled in the numbered areas with the numbered paints and voila, a painting emerged. A Detroit artist, Max Klein, had a major role in creating paint by number kits. Klein was a graduate of the Detroit Institute of Technology. He bought Detroit's Palmer Paint Company in 1945 and started selling kits of figurines and paints. Convinced that these packaged sets had a future, Klein hired artist Dan Robbins to ask him to think up similar creations. Robbins examined a child's poster paint set that came with a washable canvas and pre printed image. He then recalled that Leonardo da Vinci had sometimes assigned numbers to unfinished parts of his paintings for his assistants to complete. Robbins merged the concepts into the idea for the paint by number kits. Max Klein had six different images printed on canvases and bought gelatin capsules and filled them with paint. In 1950, Palmer paint began marketing its new kits, which it dubbed Craftmaster. Palmer initially sold its Craftmaster sets through SS Kresge dime stores. The kit sold well. So well, in fact, that Palmer soon had to expand into factories in Romeo, Michigan and Toledo, Ohio. The factories employed 800 people and produced 50,000 kits a day. Competitors soon entered the market and cut into Palmer's sales of Craftmaster kits. Max Klein sold Palmer paint in 1955 and moved all the paint by number operations to Toledo. Craftmaster eventually became part of General Mills and was renamed Crafthouse International and was still later purchased by Chartpak Incorporated of Massachusetts. From 1976 to 2000, a chart pack factory in Kalkaska, Michigan produced paint by number kits. Today, collectors look upon the early finished paint by numbers as folk art that sometimes sell for several hundred dollars. And it all started with a simple idea in Michigan. This Michigan history moment was brought to you by michiganhistorymagazine.org.