Paintings are matched by shape, not by size you pick
Most custom painting packs fail because the artwork's aspect ratio does not match any slot. Here is how matching actually works.
Minecraft 26.2 ships 51 paintings, and they are not interchangeable canvases. Each one has a fixed block footprint, and the game only ever places a painting whose footprint fits the wall space it found. Get the ratio wrong and your artwork is simply never selected.
The slot shapes that exist
The 51 paintings break down by width-by-height in blocks:
| Size | Count |
|---|---|
| 1x1 | 8 |
| 2x2 | 12 |
| 3x3 | 9 |
| 4x4 | 5 |
| 4x2 | 5 |
| 2x1 | 5 |
| 1x2 | 3 |
| 3x4 | 2 |
| 4x3 | 2 |
Note the asymmetry: 4x2 exists but 2x4 does not, and 1x2 exists but 2x1 also exists separately. Orientation is not mirrored for you.
Why your image gets rejected
A painting's texture is not stretched to fit whatever wall it lands on. The game picks a painting whose declared size matches the available space, then draws that painting's texture at that size. So a source image must be authored at the exact pixel dimensions of the slot it targets.
A 1x1 painting is a 16x16 texture — 256 pixels. A 4x4 painting is 64x64. Those are definitional properties of the texture format, not registry data, and they are the numbers you actually need when resizing.
If you supply a wide panoramic image and only 1x1 slots are free on your wall, nothing appears. The pack is fine; the placement is not.
Java and Bedrock diverge here
Java resource packs address paintings through the vanilla painting registry and a texture atlas. Bedrock uses its own pack manifest structure and a different folder layout. The artwork files themselves are the same PNG dimensions, but a pack built for one edition will not load in the other. Build and download separately.
The Bedrock side also handles pack versioning more strictly, so a pack that works today can be flagged after a game update even though no painting changed.
Practical matching
Work backwards from the wall, not forwards from the image:
- Measure the wall in blocks. A 3-wide, 2-tall gap can only take a 3x2 painting — and no 3x2 exists in the list above, so that gap stays empty.
- Match your source image's aspect ratio to a slot that actually exists before you resize anything.
- Keep one pack per edition. Mixing Java and Bedrock assets produces a pack that loads in neither.
The tool matches your uploaded image to the slot whose shape fits it and hands back the finished pack for Custom Paintings.