Crayola True to Life crayons first impression: You can never have enough crayons!

Recently spotted this new Crayola "True to Life" crayons at craft stores and local retailers. This carded set of 8 twistable tri-color crayons is a fun compact coloring kit that packs one important lesson: "Fire isn't just red, it has shades of orange too!" Beginning artists tend to use a single crayon to represent a color they think they see in nature ending with flat colored pictures with little visual interest. In real life, the color of most objects can be best represented by overlaying and combining closely related primary shades with a secondary color for highlights. These tri-color crayons take out the guesswork of choosing the more harmonious useful color combinations and provide a convenient palette to breath life and visual punch to kids' drawings.
The left side of the third coloring test was sketched using the "True to Life" crayons while the right side was done using single colored crayons. Thus with the same amount of effort, kids can create livelier pictures while learning to reach greater coloring depth by mixing colors. While I still have to get this set in the hands of our prime tester (Nicole), I would not hesitate to recommend it as a treat to any crayon-loving kid.

Crayola Paint Brush Pens: Another new coloring tool for kids

Got a new set of Crayola Paint Brush Pens to test, yaaay!!! Their "No Drip" design proofed to be quite effective, so there were no messy leaking accidents (like we did when trying the Bienfang Watercolor Brush System with a faulty seal on a Cadmium red brush pen, and their permanent paint making them somewhat less suitable for children).
They performed well while drawing freehand sketches. Paint flowed freely from the brush tips with no pressure needed. No rinse water cups required, so they can be taken for quick painting on-the-go on a moment's notice!
Fun for quickly filling coloring pages while practicing brush control instead of wearing down more expensive sable brushes on the early experimental stages.
Might be nice if they were available as more than 5 color sets. This time we had a set of 10 Tombow dual brush pens to expand the basic palette and provide a few more color choices.
So easy to grip and use with small hands, than also the hyper little one sat still long enough to create her own masterpiece of blue smiley faces. Recommended mess-free portable self-contained coloring brush pens for budding artists.

Manga comic drawing by Nicole

Canson Fanboy Make Your Own Manga Book picked up on clearance at Michael's prove to be a suitable creative sketchbook for Nicole once the manga comic frames were pre-drawn for her with the templates provided. Partnered with a few KOH-I-NOOR Magic FX Pencils to stimulate some fun doodling we end up with a good compact kit to develop coloring skills. Lessons being that we do not have to rely just on a single color for each section of a drawing and to enjoy some random effects while creating art.
Focused and enjoying her new drawing tools.
Decided it was best to display digital photographs of her earlier efforts rather than scans since the fluorescent neon colors could not be picked up with my scanner.
Ghost encounter and the cast of "Avatar" in stick figure style heads.