The latest episode in the Toyologist series!
Do you ever have one of those moments when you think "Why didn't I think of that?" Well, I had one of those moments whilst we were playing with this. When I first saw it, I just thought it would make a mess but gave into pester power last Sunday afternoon to allow the children to play with it, and realised how wrong I was. Mind you, I still used the messy mat to cover the kitchen table.
The set is unbelievably simple. The "airbrush" is actually a small plastic tube. You attach one of the felt pens to the end so that the tip sits across the bottom opening of the tube and you blow through the tube to airbrush. I was dubious that this would work at first. You also get various cardboard stencils and some paper. The stencils need pressing out on first use but were easy to do although a bit fiddly for little hands. If you're that way inclined, you could create your own, but I'm not.
Once you're ready to go, you point the tube at the stencil and paper, blow and hey presto! It works. It took a little while for the children to work out the right amount of puff to do it well and I did have to help a bit. They blew a bit hard sometimes, leading to a few splodges and you do need to take regular breaks from blowing but they loved it. So did I!
It took about 5-10 minutes to make a picture and that was with a lot of colour changes! That's perfect for Monkey and Missy Woo - what I found was they would draw with the pens on the design whilst the other was using the airbrush. We played for about an hour with it and they have asked to play with it again. For its price (£9.99), I'd say it's good entertainment value for that price and I'd definitely recommend it for children of a similar age (5 and 4) or older.
Have a look at our slideshow below to see pictures of some of our creations and the children creating them.
(I was provided with this toy to review and have received no other compensation. The opinions stated here are my own, and have not been influenced by the aforementioned compensation.)