Recommended Age:	8+
Cost:	$24.99
Company Site:	www.plasmarttoys.com
Website:	www.plasmarttoys.com

Doodle Art is an amazing way to color/create your own poster art from someone else’s Doodle. Seriously someone Doodled the pictures and you get to color them with felt pens…very nice double ended felt pens in awesome and bright colors. I cannot believe we are JUST discovering Doodle Art!

We love to color in our house. I mean LOVE it. I have a box full of those 24 packs of crayons and tons of notebooks and color books. The kids even have some! Seriously I think we have had close to 100 boxes of those crayons. I love back to school sales where they cost 25 cents each too!

I have a Graphic Designer background so I LOVE to color (and design, shade and make perfect everything I do…) and have shared this love with my kids. For the record I try to only share the love of coloring (and crafting) and not the OCD-like tendencies of only using colors that work well with each other.

When we received the Doodle Art Mini Kits I really wanted to open it up and start coloring. Then I was reminded that I should at least let my kids try one. I know it says recommended 8+ but I think if your child has the patience to sit and color one of these and the love and desire to do it (and can color mostly in the lines) you should let them try.

My son chose the Race one first with a train, a car, boat, semi, ship, plane, zeppelin (or blimp?) and a race car (by Murray Tonkin). I wanted to make sure he wasn’t just going to scribble all over it in one or two colors so we practiced for a few days in color books before he was allowed to color one. He worked really hard to get better at coloring so he could color one of these.

He stayed in the lines and his use of color was interesting. You can’t really tell where the vehicles end and another begins but he loved doing it and that is all really cared about. My daughter on the other hand could not be trusted just yet so the Gentlman’s friend, we will call her The Mouse, colored one with him. She chose Butterflies drawn by Moira Wenreich.

This one in black and white looked like a herd (flock?) of butterflies were invading the paper and you could not tell where they separated until you started coloring it. This one looks like it can be beautiful if colored pretty much at all. She loves butterflies she said and I mean who doesn’t really?

DoodleArt has 5 24″x 34″ options or 2 Mini Kit options that have 4 11″ x 14″ posters in each tube to color. They come in a hard plastic tube that twists towards the bottom to open and can act as a marker cup holder. This was brilliante because you take the lid off and viola! you have a cup holder for your markers…no rolling or falling on the floor for them!. The posters are rolled up inside but when gently rolled the opposite direction straighten out easily and surprisingly smoothly.

Each poster or Mini Kit comes with 12 markers that have a fine tip felt pen on one side and a calligraphy tip on the other. This means you can color those pesky tiny little evil dots with one side and smoothly and easily color the larger areas with the other. The crazy person in me loves this…My son seemed to love it too and actually used both sides for the correct purpose. Well mostly anyway.

The images on the posters look a bit confusing in black and white with all those lines but when colored (even by a 5 year old) look amazing! Be prepared to work on it for awhile and maybe take a break now and then. It takes a LOT longer than you would think to complete one of these.

The Gentleman took about 3 days working it for just an hour or so at a time. That was with me forcing him to take a break or stop. He does love his coloring. I didn’t do too bad on mine either but after a two hour stretch and only 65% done…I knew it would be another day when I finished. I chose Kites by Moira Weinreich and I was a little nervous to color it to be honest. 

The perfectionist in me really wanted to color this beautiful drawing but that same part of my brain was afraid I would choose the wrong color in the wrong spot and mess the whole thing up! I was reassured by my wonderful son who told me “you can do it Mommy, you can stay in the lines see like this…” and then showed me how to color in the lines. I do love that kid.

I never had these as a kid but I am very glad I can color them now and share them with my kids. They are amazing works of art that you then get to personalize into your own amazing masterpiece. Printed on durable thick poster paper means it won’t tear easy and when you hang it on your wall it will brighten up any room or anyone’s day if it is a present!

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
~ Pablo Picasso