Crayola Mini Light Designer product reviews

Crayola has been a brand that I have known and loved since I was little. When I think of Crayola, I think of quality art materials. With this in mind, I was very excited to be chosen to test and review the Crayola Mini Light Designer.

I love the fact that the pens can be stored inside the unit when they are not in use. I found this very helpful for storage and being able to find them again when we wanted to have a play. It was a little frustrating that the panels come out sometimes when you don't want them to. Although, the upside is that they are easy to get out when you wish to trace something onto the panels. I also found that if I tried to hold the unit up with the panels splayed out so I could see the animation, they would fall back together and not stay where I wanted them. An extremely positive note is that the unit turns off after a while of not being used to prevent the batteries being drained by children leaving it on.

Mr 4 is just getting into writing words and we had some fun playing with words on the Mini Light Designer in the dark. It added a bit of extra fun to writing, reading and spelling. It is quite a different experience to writing on paper in day light.

When we were in the dark, Mr 4 noticed that there were rainbows on the wall. This led to a discussion about light refracting. I had to brush up on a few facts myself, but a quick search on Google helped me out. The rainbows have been a focal point each time we have taken the Mini Light Designer out to play with. Perhaps more of a focal point than the actual intended activity for the product.

There is an instruction sheet in the box to tell you how to use the four buttons for the lights. My children and I just played with them rather than trying to follow the instructions. There seemed like too many different combinations for us to bother learning them all. We are more into learning by doing.

It took a while to try to figure out how to make the most out of the Mini Light Designer. We tried drawing on each panel as suggested and found that it wasn't that effective. Watching the little video clip on the Craoyla (AU) site helped me to see that if you splay out the panels, you can get a good effect. Having a very dark room is really important in order to see the individual panels light up.

It was a novel toy to play with but I don't think it will be used for its designed purposed very much in our house. I think that is it most likely to become a light/torch to play with or else a place to practice writing words as I mentioned above. After quite a bit of playing, I have been left feeling that I am missing something about how to actually use this product in order to make it an effective activity for my children.

I love creative toys where there is no pre-scripted end product. This toy gives the user the chance to draw what ever they want. I do think that there are limitations though. The fact that there are only three panels makes for a very short animation and I think that children could easily lose interest. The price of the Mini Light Designer makes it a rather expensive toy that I don't think would get an excessive amount of use with us.

We were lucky enough to be given the Crayola light designer to try, and my almost-6 year old was super excited to break into the box as she loves to draw and this toy seemed to be centred around drawing and creativity.

I liked the look of the product from the word go with nice brightly packaged box and the product inside being compact enough for easy storage. The light designer comes with 3 pens - orange, green and blue which seemed strange choices to me so my cynical mind said they are making us want to buy more colours straight away. The other part of me thought maybe these were the optimum colours to make the product work... although it turns out that I soon debunked that myth, but more on that later. I have no idea how long these pens will last, but if they do run out you'd need to buy mini gel FX markers as these must be used. I have no idea how easy these are to come by.

The pens store neatly inside the light designer which is great as you must use specially designed pens for this so I would hate them to get mixed up with my daughters other felt pens. I was a bit surprised that there is no labelling on the markers to say they are gel FX markers as it would be really easy to forget they are the ones to use with this product if they did get mixed up.

The product does not come with batteries - warning, warning... make sure you have 3 AA batteries on hand if you buy this, and luckily we did.

Anyway first impressions over and we quickly got to work creating a design together on each of the pull out panels. The panels pop in and out of the light designer so you can work on them on a flat surface easily. The pens didn't seem to show up that well on the plastic discs, but I assumed at this stage that they would light up better once we got to stage 2 (turning it on in a darkened room).

We created a free hand design and although the product is designed so you can make it almost look animated if you keep your designs similar but advancing each time, we just wanted to try this thing out! We then shut ourselves in a bedroom, curtains closed (we have very dark curtains) and turned it the machine on... hmmm, we weren't even sure anything was actually happening!

There are 4 buttons which do seem a little confusing at first, but one is the one that toggles the light from panel to panel so we pretty much stuck to using that one, but we were incredibly disappointed in the result. Luckily before my daughter got completely disheartened, I remembered my craft room which has no windows - the perfect blackened room. In we went and shut the door, expecting to finally see our magic happen! No such luck

By now my daughter was over the whole thing, but I was determined to figure out a way. I read the instructions several times but couldn't see anything we were doing wrong. I wondered if putting a darker background behind the panels might help and perhaps using one of the stencils they mentioned you could find on their website.

Off I went to the website to find the stencils and eventually located them (tip - don't go to the OZ/NZ site - you need the .com site for these). I printed some off and we came back to testing it out a week later when we were all refreshed. My daughter and I excitedly traced off a picture on each panel showing a rocket taking off and something exploding - a good fun start.

Back to the craft room we went and we tried the light toggling effect again, first as normal with the white background that the light comes with. We couldn't see anything so I tried slipping some black card in behind the panels. Finally we could see something - and it was toggling like a (very mini) animated movie. I tried red card too and decided this worked just as well behind the colour pens we had, so cut a circle to fit neatly behind the panels. Finally it showed some promise and was (in a weak way) doing what it suggested it was supposed to do. We also found with the card behind it, that it worked in the semi-dark bedroom too, so we didn't need to have the room as completely black as we first thought.

However it just wasn't exciting enough to keep my daughters interest and I was already noticing the toggling light was showing up a lot of scratches all over the panels. We'd only used this product for a few minutes, so they must have come from wiping the pen off after our first use. I admit that I used a dry tissue at first before noticing it wasn't working and reading that it needed to be dampened, but surely I didn't do that much damage straight away!

So with all the difficulties my daughter is already over the product so I'm packing it away and re-introducing it again down the track now that I know what we need to do to ensure it works as it is meant to.

It's designed for children age 6 and up but my daughter is so close to this age, and she really does love creative art, so it would have thought it would be perfect for her. Part of me is tempted to buy more gel FX markers and get some decent bright colours, but the other part of me says it won't really help fix the underlying problem that the whole product, whilst a great concept, just doesn't work that well.

I'm rating this product really average as the concept is great and I did get it working in a weak sort of way, but I have to say if you buy this, you need to see it as a cheap plastic toy that might amuse a little, rather than something amazing and fantastic.

Today we finally had a chance to break this Crayola Mini Light Designer out. My daughter was very excited to toy test this for me. This comes in a glossy box. The green is exciting and kinetic. The light itself looks really neat and is in very modern technology colours - white and orange. Design wise, the shape and colour made it clear that they had really thought about what kids would love to design.

When we opened the box, it was all very easy to get out. The light took up most of the room inside. There are three plastic wrapped marker pens and an instruction manual too. I realised that I would need batteries and luckily we have a stash of extras for just such an occasion. I needed to open the battery backing with a screw driver, and then screw it closed when done. At first I was thinking that it was a lot of work, but then I really thought about it. It's a good safety feature and though it was a bit annoying, I'd rather be huffing about some extra work than taking a trip to A&E because the toddler got into it. So good on ya, Crayola.

My daughter sat down to her table and took a look at the way the slides moved in and out and then decided on her designs. She wanted to do some birds, one in flight and one catching a worm and then one eating the shivering worm. She carefully drew her pictures, using just one colour. She was pretty happy with the set and didn't smudge the work. She is often a little devil-may-care about this sort of thing, so it was good to see that the resulting picture wasn't affected. She is 7 years old, so I think it was the right sort of activity for her. She is old enough that I can explain the process, but still a little unable/unwilling to follow instructions.

Once the pictures were done we took the light into a darkened room and started to play with the settings. We didn't really know what we were doing, but it was fun to push them each in turn and see what they did. The light effect was pretty good. Two of the pictures showed up pretty clearly as the lights cycled through, though it was harder to see the one towards the back I think. You can see in the video we took the sort of quality it is.

I'd love to have a sneaky play with it with the traceable pictures you can get online as well, just to see if I could get a clear animation out of it. However, I'm not sure I'll be allowed near it. She was so pleased with it, that when her dad got home, she dragging him to a darkened room to see her cool pictures too.

For almost $30, it's quite a nice novelty art project. A little steep for everyday purchasing, but it would make a nice little gift for a birthday or Christmas, or as a school holiday activity. I'll definitely be considering something like this for my niece.