Your little picasso won't be impressed by this one (Crayola Beginnings My First Easel)

Member Name: karalouk

Product:	Crayola Beginnings My First Easel
Date:	10/06/09 (165 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Could have been a good toy

Disadvantages: Isn't a good toy! (see review)

My First Easel is a toy from the Crayola Beginnings range. The range is designed to "help develop toddler's motor skills and self-expression" and is aimed at 1-4 year olds.

I first saw the easel in a magazine a few weeks before christmas and thought it looked quite good. When a family remember asked what my daughter would like for christmas I prompty pointed the easel out to them.

My daughter was 20 months at the time and My First Easel is recommended for children 18 months and over.

Our easel was brought from Boots for £15.00 but was also available at Toys R Us, Amazon.co.uk, Woolworths, John Lewis, Debenhams and Tesco Direct, all for around the same price.

When my daughter unwrapped it on christmas day she was very interested and wanted to play with it right away. We took it out of it's colourful cardboard box and I was suprised at how small it was. I knew it wasn't a full size easel but it was literally just a lap sized toy, and once the border was taken into consideration the drawing areas themselves were very small indeed. At it's widest point the easel is 12 inches but the drawing areas are only 8 inches. The easel is in 2 halves (I'll explain this in a minute), the total length of the easel is 21 inches - one side being 10 inches and the other being 11 inches. The drawing areas are only 5 inches tall. Because of the size it means it's quite portable and it also has a handle at the top to easily carry about, but for £15 I would have liked to have seen more drawing space.

The easel can be laid out flat (to play on a table, floor or lap), put into a triangle shape (with an activity on each side) or folded up for easy storage. To move the easel into your required position there are 2 yellow buttons on the top of the easel, both of these needs to be pressed in whilst adjusting the easel and released when positioned to lock it into place. If both of the buttons aren't pressed then the easel won't budge. Right, now time for some mathematics! 2 yellow buttons require 2 hands, and 1 easel positioning requires 1 hand, so how many hands is that? Well 3 of course! And how many hands does the average human have? Uh.. oh yes, 2! Yes you've worked it out already, and if I have trouble performing this what should be easy task then I'm not quite sure how a toddler is ever meant to grasp it. The buttons are also too hard for toddlers to press in.

These next parts are going to be hard to explain but bare with me...

On one side of the easel the drawing area is a yellow background (plastic I presume) covered over by a thick blue gel with a transparent sheet over the top (so the gel cannot escape). The idea is to put pressure on the blue gel so that it makes way and shows the yellow colour underneath. You can draw and write on it and the easel also comes with 3 stampers to stamp shapes on it. The stampers come in circle, square and triangle and look like little eggs from the top. The stampers can be stored in a little green plastic shelf which is situated on the bottom of the easel. The stampers allow me to teach my daughter shapes which is good. To get rid of the drawings you need to gently wipe your hand over the gel so it all evens out and the yellow covers up again. This isn't a problem for me but yet again it isn't easy for a toddler to do - my daughter comes to me every time she needs to get rid. I suppose the concept is quite good and unique and I suspect most toddlers would be interesting in it, however I don't think it would ever make more than a minute or twos worth of fun. It's quite restrictive and repetative.. blue, yellow, blue, yellow!

On the other side of the easel is a big white drawing area (we'll call this 'magic paper' for the benefit of the review). There is also a plastic pen which is attatched by a piece of string to the bottom of the easel and a compartment with a plastic orange lid/door - the compartment is about 4 times too big for the pen, the string is too short and the lid/door has fallen off! The pen needs to be unscrewed and filled with water, then screwed back on and the pen should then be used on the magic paper. The magic paper has a multi coloured swirly background underneath so when you draw on it with the water pen you should be able to create multi coloured pictures and when the water dries up (should take a couple of minutes) the pictures dissapear and you can start again. The problem is the pen doesn't work at all - when you try to draw or write on the magic paper nothing happens, no water comes out. Don't think that giving the pen a little shake and a little tap on the magic paper will do the trick because instead the water just pours out and within a matter of seconds the white has turned to multi coloured and the whole thing is saturated. The 'magic paper' now has permanant water stains on and has wrinkles in. It also is totally undurable - the pen has made scratches all over the magic paper - some of the scratches are white and grey but most of them have gone through to the multi coloured background. The whole thing is basically ruined.

I recently visited Amazon.co.uk to see what other people had to say about this product and to get a sanity check to see if I was overreacting. I was expecting to see a lot of positive reviews which would have probably meant I had an easel from a dodgy batch, but no, on arrival at Amazon I was greeted by a whole long list of 1 stars and angry comments.

I always thought of Crayola as an inovative and trusted brand but I'll be thinking twice in future.

It's sad because had this toy been any good then I actually think my daughter would have really enjoyed it (she often tries to play with it and asks me to fill up the pen with water in some hope that it will work!) - I think it needs to be taken off the shelves, given a serious rethinking and then released again when it's up to scratch. My advise would be to buy an aquadraw by Tomy or just use good old pens, paper, crayons, pencils and paints - it's messier but a lot more fun.

Basically I wouldn't recommend this to anybody. It is a waste of time, money and is a total dissapointment - infact the only good thing to come out of this product is writing this review and hopefully stopping somebody else making the same mistake as me!

What a shame I didn't have the receipt...

Summary: Just really disappointing.