Gate to Paradise

In stock products will usually ship on Mondays and Thursdays.
Products made in-house to order (like custom tray holders) will ship usually within 4-5 days.
Custom Art designs can take 4-6 weeks for manufacture then shipped to you.

Kits come with everything you need to make the painting. You will definitely receive all the dots you need for your kit, a tray, wax, a basic pen. Sometimes you may receive small ziplock bags or tweezers.

This is going to differ for each person and how they like to work. Here is a basic list of things you might find useful to have on hand –

Tray holder – well we invented this and find it very useful in the studio but I recommend it because it is not until you spill your dots all over your uncovered canvas that you truly know the pain of making that mistake. And it can still happen with a tray holder – my cat knocked a tray holder off a studio table last week and I spent 20 minutes on the carpet picking up those dots. it was my fault, the tray holder was too close to the edge of the table.

Pen – everyone likes to use their own favourite pen. Some people collect pens. We do have a small range of pens available but that range by no means is even a tiny amount of all the kinds of pens available out there in the world!

Faulty drill pot – Here in the studio we use small bowls from IKEA to put faulty drills into. I like the IKEA KALAS bowls for this purpose – they are microwave safe, dishwasher safe, and very handy to have omn hand for all manner of things including to use as a faulty dot pot. 

Rubbish Bowl – We also like to use the KALAS as a rubbish bowl but I prefer to keep the rubbish separate from the drills as much of the rubbish is plastic and can be recycled with your normal recycling.

Light – Light is important – it all comes down to what works best for you. Light boards are great to use under a kit – we do sometimes have them in stock. Lighting in the room is quite important too.

Straightening tool – some folks use an old credit card, we have two different designs of the correction tool in our store – one is printed in house by us, the other comes from the factory in China. You can use these in two ways – you can use it as a ruler while dotting where you hold it on the line and place your dots straight up against it, or you can use it to push the dots once you have placed them – sometimes depending on the kind of glue the ruler option is the most effective choice.

Tweezers – Always handy when you have to remove a dot but also very handy for the sparkly drill kits as some of those drills are harder to pick up with the pen.

Baby Wipes – essential for cleaning dust, dirt, hair etc from the glue and can also be used to remove paper from the canvas if you accidentally stick it to the glue.

There are mainly two types of drills – the special sparkly drills which look a bit like rhinestones, and the resin acrylic drills which you will find in the full drill and partial drill kits.

The special sparkly drills which look a bit like rhinestones are my personal favourite and you will tend to see a lot of these in my store. Some of them have an Aurora Borealis coating which gives a pearly effect that changes colour as you move it.

These drills are usually supplied with the kit you order – it is difficult to get spares of these kinds of drills. For this reason I suggest you always keep any leftovers – you might want to use them in another kit in place of another colour, you might run out of that colour with another kit and need a few more, you might want to drizzle a few through a full drill just to give it a bit more zing.

The resin acrylic drills have a glitz to them but they are not like rhinestones. They will shimmer in the light. They are available in 445 different colour shades in colour codes known as DMC numbers.

It is simply the shape of the diamond you apply to your kit. Square drills seem to be something people either love working with or hate working with. I recommend everyone tries a square drill kit and see whether or not you like doing them. It is a personal choice.

Round drill kits are a lot easier because you don’t have to line all the drills up exactly, it generally doesn’t matter so much where you put your dots with a round drill kit.

Most of my dotters prefer round drill kits so that is what I specialise in. Our family factory also specialise in round drills – and sparkly drills – so that works out well for us. I can source square drill kits from a different factory and will do that for you if you prefer square drills.