Painting

Paintings in Minecraft are simple, low-resolution versions of a canvas; they currently appear in Beta, Alpha, Infdev, and Indev. Most of the twenty four (19 in indev and infdev) current canvases are by Kristoffer Zetterstrand and are shrunken to a low resolution to fit Minecraft's graphical theme. 5 more are edits or new paintings. A random image from among these is chosen each time a painting is placed. Paintings currently are not flammable, nor do they stop light or players from passing through if blocks behind them are removed after their placement. Paintings can only be placed on flat, vertical surfaces. An easy way to get a painting to fill up the area you want is to place it in the bottom-left corner. It expands canvas size to the top-right to fill up the wall the best it can, though it may still take a few tries to get a large painting.

If hit with a throw-able item (such as an Egg, a Snowball or an Arrow), the painting will drop from the wall and can be picked up and placed again. Arrows will disappear when they hit a painting.

Crafting
Paintings can be crafted with any color of wool. The color of Wool used does not have an influence of the picture chosen when the painting is placed.

As of Beta 1.2, paintings will drop when any supporting block is removed, making the creation of "Secret Doors" more difficult. You can still attach a larger painting to a block beside a door, and it will cover the door, making it hidden. Note that ladders, signs, and weight-plates technically count as full blocks, and can be used to aid in the creation of covered doors.

Paintings may additionally be used to hide chests in walls, as the painting will not prevent a player from opening the chest. This is especially useful on large multi-player servers.

Paintings are not technically a block, and thus can simultaneously exist with water and sometimes other blocks such as torches in the same space as itself.

Canvases
There are currently 19 canvases in Indev, but there are 24 in Beta. These are mostly based on paintings by Kristoffer Zetterstrand, who also created the Minecraft versions.

Bugs

 * It is possible to get two paintings from destroying one painting.
 * Used to be indestructible in SMP, only dropping "fake" paintings every hit, which could not be destroyed or picked up. This was fixed in Beta 1.2.
 * When a painting is placed it sometimes shows a four by four area of solid purple with darker purple between each block. This is because Notch forgot to update the painting texture for the Beta 1.2_01 build, when he added a new painting.