Winnie The Pooh Magic Painting - Disney Magic Painting

Author's product rating:   

How easy was it to read / get information from	Very easy
How interesting was the book?	Compelling
How useful was it?	Indispensable
Would you read it again?	Yes
Value for money	Good

Advantages:	Easy to do, very little mess
Disadvantages:	Decent books can be a bit more expensive

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

***Background***

Magic Painting books were a favourite of mine when I was a little girl, many years ago. It's something that my older girls used to love doing and my son loved painting at nursery too, but of course that can be very messy to start with until a child is able to control a paintbrush a little bit. You can find a wide variety of them around in a lot of the bargain bookstores or Poundstretcher but this one was a favourite of my son's because he loved Pooh Bear when he was younger.

The reason for writing this now is because we were tidying through all his finished books and found it. It is still available for sale though and I'm sure a lot of other pre-schoolers would like it too. We also found that there were still a couple of pictures to do so I'm sure my son will be asking about this tonight when he comes home from school.

***The Book***

Magic Painting is so called because the pages in the book are all varying colours of grey - that is until you add some water onto them. Then they burst into colour and your picture is complete.

This Winnie the Pooh version has 31 full pictures of Pooh Bear and his friends including one with Eeyore's tail blowing off and a pirate picture with Tigger and Roo digging for treasure. Each one has colours that match the characters pretty well and bright background.

What makes this book a little bit different from some other magic painting books, is that there are perforated edges in the centre so that the picture can be removed and pinned up around your home.

***My Thoughts***

We've had a lot of these books in our home, as even now my son still enjoys doing them. They vary in a lot of ways, but mostly because you tend to find that the cheaper versions don't really cut it when water is added. Each section of colour is usually too small so the colours run into each other when a small child is trying to splatter water all over the page. Another problem is that there often isn't enough colour on the paper so they sometimes look a bit wishy washy.

Happily this isn't the case with this book, but then it is around 3 times the normal price so you expect a bit of quality. Of course you do still have to be careful when colouring in different sections and getting your child to remember to wash out their brush each time can be tricky, but the colours on these pages really stand out quite well and the thickness of them means that the water doesn't tend to soak through to the picture of the reverse side of the page. This can also be a problem with cheaper books.

The pictures themselves are good in this book because they all feature a great bunch of characters that most children are aware of. Disney endorses the book so it's not just some cheap imitations that you are getting here. The quality is superb and we haven't been let down here at all. After all, there's nothing worse than giving something like this to a child for them to be disappointed with their finished masterpiece. We've found that it's best to lay them flat when drying them otherwise the colours can run into each other.

Magic painting books are a great idea to start off a child with a paintbrush. If the coloured water does land on a surface that you don't want it to be on, then it washes off quite easily, although we did find that if it dries on, it can be a little bit tougher to get the blue to come off. Clothes won't be harmed though and even my son's overalls have come out clean after getting some on them. It's certainly a lot easier to clean up than using real paints although that can obviously be fun too.

***Price & Availability***

I think my mum got this book from Woolworths for my son but it is available online from Amazon for the publishing price of £2.99.

ISBN No. 1405461985