As a full time dad to a nearly 3 year old girl, I am always looking for ways to occupy her and also to encourage a bit of creativity. I have bought her Play Doh and we do lots of arts and crafts things together, such as; Sticking coloured tissue/foam/glitter etc onto paper, drawing and painting.

I purchased an apron from Morrisons for under £3.00 and then I had a look online and found this set of paints on amazon.co.uk for £5.86. Crayola is a brand name when it comes to arts and crafts, it first made its name producing crayons, but now it has a whole range of different arts and crafts products, so it was a brand I could trust.

== What's in the box ==

4 x 237ml paints in red, green, yellow and blue (The 4 main primary colours)

When the paints came they were well packaged, although smaller than I expected, but a little goes a long way. It does say on the tubes "Not suitable for finger painting", but I figured she's going to get her hands messy anyway, so we might as well transfer that mess onto paper and make some art out of it. It also says on the tube "Suitable for 3+", but if a child is well supervised, there is no reason why a child of 2 and a half wouldn't be able to use them. I usually make a palette with a couple of paper plates and then I put the tubes away to be used another day, that way she has enough paints to be getting on with for an hour or so.

==Verdict ==

I didn't anticipate how hard it was going to be to get my daughter to get messy and covered in paint. I tried to get her to do some hand paints first, as I had purchased a couple of small canvases that I was going to give to her mum and her nan as Mothers Day gifts, this proved to be no mean feat. Eventually after showing her that it's OK to get messy hands, with some thorough demonstrations by myself, she started to produce some really nice finger paints. We moved on from the finger paints and I purchased a brush set from Morrisons for £2.00 and I cut up some potatoes and sponges and we did some lovely prints. In a supervised environment these paints are a great buy for a young child, your child can get really messy, but the paints wash off any surface really easily. Like I said earlier, a little goes a long way with these paints, we try and do painting a few times a month and my daughter has had these paints for about 3 months now and there's still about a 1/4 of the tube left in each tube. £5.86 for four tubes of paint that will last over 3 months is great value for money and when I am running low I will not hesitate to buy these again.