Minecraft Paintings: The Complete List, Sizes & How to Place Them
A finished Minecraft house isn’t finished until something hangs on the walls — and Minecraft paintings are how you do it. The game now contains 47 different paintings, from a tiny one-block kebab to a four-by-four flaming skull, and most of them are pixel versions of real paintings hanging in a Swedish artist’s studio. This guide lists every single canvas by size, name, and artist, explains how the game decides which painting you get, and shows the wall trick that lets you force the exact size you want every time.
How to Craft a Painting
The recipe never changes and costs almost nothing:
- 8 sticks around the edge of the crafting grid
- 1 wool (any colour) in the centre
The wool colour makes no difference at all — white, black, or rainbow wool all produce the same painting item, and which picture you get is decided when you place it, not when you craft it. There’s a second source worth knowing: a master-level shepherd villager sells 3 paintings for 2 emeralds, handy if you’re decorating a whole village and your stick supply is thin.
How Painting Sizes Work (and the Wall Trick)
Paintings are entities, not blocks, and placing one follows a simple rule documented on the Minecraft Wiki’s painting page:
- The game looks at the empty wall space around where you clicked.
- It finds the largest canvas size that fits that space.
- It picks at random from all paintings of that size.
So a bare 5×5 wall can give you anything up to 4×4 — usually not what you wanted. The fix is the wall trick: temporarily block off the wall so that the only open rectangle is the exact size you’re after. Want a 2×2? Frame a 2×2 hole with any blocks, place the painting inside it, then remove the frame — the painting stays. Want a specific picture within a size? Keep breaking and replacing the painting; it re-rolls among that size’s canvases each time.
Three more mechanics worth knowing:
- A painting cannot cover a hole in the wall — its whole area needs support behind it.
- If a supporting block is removed, the painting pops off after about a second unless the block is replaced.
- Paintings don’t burn, light passes through them, and players can walk straight through them (see the secret-door section below).
The Complete List of Minecraft Paintings
There are 47 paintings in the game: 40 by Kristoffer Zetterstrand, 6 by Sarah Boeving, and 1 by Jens Bergensten. Below is every one, grouped by size — sizes are width × height in blocks.
1×1 Paintings (16×16 pixels) — 8
| Painting | Artist | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Kebab med tre pepperoni | Zetterstrand | A kebab with three green chili peppers |
| de_aztec | Zetterstrand | The Aztec map from Counter-Strike, seen in free-look |
| Albanian | Zetterstrand | A man in a fez beside a house and a bush |
| de_aztec (second version) | Zetterstrand | Another free-look view of the Aztec map |
| Target Successfully Bombed | Zetterstrand | The Dust II map from Counter-Strike |
| Paradisträd | Zetterstrand | Two potted plants (“paradisträd” is Swedish for jade plant) |
| Wasteland | Zetterstrand | A bleak wasteland, a small animal on the windowsill |
| Meditative | Boeving | A take on Salvador Dalí’s Meditative Rose |
1×2 Paintings (16×32 pixels) — 3
| Painting | Artist | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Wanderer | Zetterstrand | A version of Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog |
| Graham | Zetterstrand | King Graham from the King’s Quest games |
| Prairie Ride | Boeving | The character Noor riding a horse, after Remington’s The Cowboy |
2×1 Paintings (32×16 pixels) — 5
| Painting | Artist | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| The Pool | Zetterstrand | People skinny-dipping in a pool balanced on a cube |
| Bonjour Monsieur Courbet | Zetterstrand | Two pointy-bearded hikers greeting, after Courbet’s The Meeting |
| sunset_dense | Zetterstrand | A mountain range at sunset |
| Seaside | Zetterstrand | Mountains and a lake, a plant on the window ledge |
| Creebet | Zetterstrand | Seaside again — but the plant is now a Creeper head |
2×2 Paintings (32×32 pixels) — 8
| Painting | Artist | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Match | Zetterstrand | A hand holding a lit match to a fireplace |
| Bust | Zetterstrand | A bust of Marcus Aurelius ringed by fire |
| The Stage Is Set | Zetterstrand | Scenery from Space Quest I, with Graham appearing twice |
| The Void | Zetterstrand | An angel praying into a void, fire below |
| Skull and Roses | Zetterstrand | A skeleton at night with red flowers in front |
| Wither | Bergensten | The creation of the wither |
| Baroque | Boeving | A still life: decorated pot, cake, and sunflower |
| Humble | Boeving | Two villagers before a village house, after American Gothic |
3×3 Paintings (48×48 pixels) — 9
| Painting | Artist | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Bouquet | Zetterstrand | A bouquet of flowers beside a stairway |
| Cavebird | Zetterstrand | A cave in a cliff with a bird flying over it |
| Cotán | Zetterstrand | A golden apple and glistering melon on a windowsill |
| Endboss | Zetterstrand | A skeleton in a brick archway |
| Fern | Zetterstrand | A potted fern on a desk, a small fire nearby |
| Owlemons | Zetterstrand | An owl in a box next to a pile of lemons |
| Sunflowers | Zetterstrand | Potted plants and a sunflower on a table |
| Tides | Zetterstrand | A lone figure sitting by the shoreline |
| Dennis | Boeving | A pale wolf, inspired by the Dennis painting in A Minecraft Movie |
3×4 Paintings (48×64 pixels) — 2
| Painting | Artist | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Backyard | Zetterstrand | Two women in a brick-arched yard, after de Hooch |
| Pond | Zetterstrand | A maiden in a pond beside a half-submerged skeleton |
4×2 Paintings (64×32 pixels) — 5
| Painting | Artist | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Fighters | Zetterstrand | Two fighters from The Way of the Exploding Fist |
| Changing | Zetterstrand | A person changing clothes among stage scenery |
| Finding | Zetterstrand | A figure peering into a freshly dug hole, ruins behind |
| Lowmist | Zetterstrand | A misty rendered mountain landscape |
| Passage | Zetterstrand | A surreal mineshaft-like hall with posed skeletons |
4×3 Paintings (64×48 pixels) — 2
| Painting | Artist | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Mortal Coil | Zetterstrand | Bruno Martinez from the adventure game Grim Fandango |
| Kong | Zetterstrand | The 100m level from Donkey Kong, paper-screenshot style |
4×4 Paintings (64×64 pixels) — 5
| Painting | Artist | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Pointer | Zetterstrand | A fighter touching a giant hand — a nod to The Creation of Adam |
| Pigscene | Zetterstrand | A girl pointing at a pig painted on a canvas |
| Skull On Fire | Zetterstrand | A flaming skull under a moonlit sky |
| Orb | Zetterstrand | An orb of light over an Italian landscape at night |
| Unpacked | Boeving | A cliff, waterfall, and floating pig — based on the old pack.png artwork |
The Four Paintings You Can’t Normally Get
Four extra 2×2 canvases exist in the game files — Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water, abstract versions of the classical elements, credited to Mojang with the artist unknown. They were reportedly made for a Pocket Edition promotional map around MINECON 2012/2013 and were never made placeable in survival. On Java Edition you can only reach them with commands or from the Creative inventory’s Operator Utilities tab. If a list elsewhere claims 51 paintings, this is why.
The Artists Behind the Canvases
Kristoffer Zetterstrand is a Swedish painter whose real oil paintings Mojang licensed and pixelated back in Minecraft’s earliest days — the kebab, the Counter-Strike maps, and the Wanderer are all his studio work, which is why so many entries in the tables above reference Friedrich, Courbet, and Cotán. He accounts for 40 of the 47.
Sarah Boeving, a Mojang artist, painted the six newest-style additions — Meditative, Prairie Ride, Baroque, Humble, Unpacked, and Dennis, the pale wolf from A Minecraft Movie. Her pieces are digital art made for the game rather than adapted gallery paintings.
Jens Bergensten (Jeb) contributed exactly one: Wither, showing the moment of the boss’s creation — the only painting that depicts a Minecraft creature being built.
The collection sat at 26 canvases for over a decade, then grew in recent updates as Mojang added Boeving’s set and a batch of Zetterstrand works that had never been in the game — which is why older guides’ lists stop at 26 and are now badly incomplete.
Getting the Exact Painting You Want
- Force the size with the wall-frame trick above — that part is fully in your control.
- Re-roll the picture by breaking and replacing. It’s random within the size, so a 1×1 (8 options) resolves fast, while hunting one specific 3×3 (9 options) can take a few tries.
- Java Creative players get it easy: the Creative inventory’s Functional Blocks tab holds preset painting items whose tooltips name the painting, its size, and its artist, and each always places that exact canvas.
- Decorating a room? Pair the canvas with the wall colours around it — our guide to the best Minecraft texture packs can change how every painting in this list looks and feels.
Secret Doors and Other Painting Tricks
Because paintings are entities you can walk through, the classic trick still works: put signs (or an open door/fence gate) in a doorway, then cover the opening with a painting. You stroll through; the wall looks solid. One honest warning from the wiki: mobs can pathfind through paintings too, so a secret door hides your base from players, not from a determined zombie. Paintings also make cheap “windows” over glowstone (light passes straight through them) and safe wall cover over lava-adjacent walls, since they never catch fire.
More build tricks like these live on our tips and tricks page, and you can find painting-worthy build ideas across the blog.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many paintings are there in Minecraft?
There are 47 placeable paintings: 40 by Kristoffer Zetterstrand, 6 by Sarah Boeving, and 1 (Wither) by Jens Bergensten. Four more elemental paintings (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water) exist in the files but can only be obtained on Java with commands or the Creative operator tab.
How do you get a specific painting in survival?
You can’t pick one directly. Frame the wall so only the size you want fits, place the painting, and keep breaking and replacing it — each placement re-rolls randomly among that size’s paintings until yours appears.
Does the wool colour change the painting?
No. Any colour of wool crafts the same painting item, and the wool has no effect on which picture or size you get. Size is decided by the wall space, and the picture is random within that size.
Why did my painting fall off the wall?
A painting needs full support behind it. If one of its backing blocks is removed and not replaced within about a second, the painting breaks and drops as an item. Explosions and projectiles will also knock paintings down.
Can you walk through paintings in Minecraft?
Yes. Paintings are entities with no collision for players and mobs, which is why they’re famous for hiding secret doors — place one over signs in a doorway and you can walk through while the wall looks untouched.
Conclusion
That’s the full gallery: 47 Minecraft paintings across nine sizes, from a one-block kebab to the 4×4 Skull On Fire — and now you know how to force the size, re-roll the picture, and even hide a door behind one. If you’re setting up the game or switching devices, our homepage has the current version details, and the complete data behind this list is kept up to date on the Minecraft Wiki.
