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| |  | Pegs and Pegboards | Home » » Alex My Art Spinner Spin Art Kit | | | | | | WARNING:| CHOKING HAZARD -- Small parts. Not for children under 3 yrs. |
| | | Description: | | Spinning Art is a blast with this art spinner kit. Make fantastic works of art with just a few drops of paint. Place black or white paper on the platform, turn My Art Spinner on, and drizzle paint from above. Drips and drops make beautiful art. | | | Features: | |
• Kits includes 20 black and white cards
• Comes with five colors of paint and glitter, too
• Requires one "C" battery (not included).
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 13.0 inches | | Product Width:
| 10.0 inches | | Product Height:
| 3.0 inches | | Package Length:
| 13.1 inches | | Package Width:
| 9.9 inches | | Package Height:
| 3.0 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.4 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 32 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 32 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 23 found the following review helpful:
 An excellent art spinner with few flaws.Feb 03, 2011
By Steven A. Godun
"sgodun"
Santa gave this to my almost-four year old daughter last Christmas and it rapidly became the hit of the season. When I was her age I had a similar art spinner, though mine was a third-generation hand-me-down that never worked exactly right. Even so, it was one of my favorites too. :-)
Out of the box you get the spinner itself, five bottles of paint, two small bottles of glitter, a bunch of cards (both small and large), a plastic "splash ring" (more on that later), and the requisite instruction guide. Installation is very simple; remove one screw to access the battery compartment, insert one "C" cell, close it up, insert a card, set the splash ring in place, turn it on and get to painting. The card is held in place by the four corners, each slipping into a little nub on the green spinning platform. There are eight such nubs on the platform, four to accommodate each card size.
The main unit is about the size of a notebook and is somewhat cheap feeling, but has withstood a month of fairly regular use with no complaints. the base structure of the unit is purple with the accents (wheel, motor cover, power switch) in lime green. A beefy built-in handle allows the unit to be carried by the child. The power switch is located in the opening between the handle and base which means accidental power-ons will be pretty much nonexistent. The green spinning platform is held in place by a single center pin via friction and it works well. Given sufficient and appropriate pressure you can remove the platform without damage which makes cleanup easy.
The main unit has five built-in receptacles to hold paint and glitter. Here's my first complaint; there are five bottles of paint provided, but only three receptacles for them. Why? I can sort of understand if there were four receptacles; the child would naturally be using one bottle and would simply swap one bottle as needed. But three? I see no logic there, only laziness. They did manage to get the number of receptacles for the glitter correct, however.
Another minor complaint: Alex Toys clearly expects this to be a portable toy, given the fact that there is a built-in carrying handle. However, the receptacles for the paint and glitter don't hold the bottles tight enough to actually be portable. They fall right out as soon as the toy is lifted. What's the deal here, Alex Toys? (TIP: I was able to overcome this by putting little Velcro dots at the bottom of each receptacle, with the mating Velcro dot at the bottom of each bottle. For the two paint bottles that have no receptacles I attached Velcro to the sides of two of the paint bottles and to the flatter sides of the unit, so the paint bottle stays attached there when not in use.)
The paints are reasonable consistency, have good opacity, and mix well into one another to create different colors. Rather than the standard fare primary colors that you find in most children's paint sets, these colors are more reminiscent of those glow-in-black-light posters you'd find at places like Spencer gifts, an effect not diminished by the fact that some of the supplied cards are black on one side. Supplied colors include blue, pink, green, red and yellow. The included glitter is standard gold and silver, each in a small vial that looks absolutely nothing like a crack vial from the 80's so don't even think about that. The paints are in non-refillable bottles so you have two options when they run out: Fork over $15 (yes, more than 50% the cost of the whole toy!) for the My Art Spinner Refill kit, or get creative with refilling the empty bottles. A small syringe and some lightly watered down finger paint will work to refill the empties. You'll need to experiment with paint consistency to get it right though; too thin and it will spray everywhere when trying to paint, too thick and it won't give you that nice radial-splay look you're going for. Note that the official refill kit doesn't include glitter, but it's just plain ol' glitter that you can get at any craft store anyway. For replacement cards you can use the refill kit, or you can just cut down some suitable card stock. Semi-glossy paper seems to work best.
Battery life is very good with one "C" cell battery easily lasting a month of near-daily use with no noticeable fade on motor power. The motor is quiet too, virtually inaudible at a distance of about five feet. One small annoyance about the motor is that it has virtually zero torque. I recognize the necessity of this in order to keep children's fingers safe, but the trade-off is that you pretty much can't use anything other than drip paints in your creations. Try to use, say, a magic marker on the spinning card and the motor will instantly slow down to a crawl as it tries to overcome the pressure of the marker. I had similar results with even a small paint brush and watercolor paints.
The "splash ring" is a special case. It sits on top of the base and keeps paint splatter (outside of the unit) to a minimum. In practice, splatter is pretty much nonexistent provided your artist doesn't go nuts with the paint so the splash ring does its job nicely. The problem is that the ring is really, really, REALLY cheap clear plastic. At first glance it looks exactly like a piece of packing material that you'd throw away, and in fact I did exactly that when I first unpacked it. Alex Toys would seem to agree with this because there's a sticker on the ring that says that it's part of the toy and not packing material. After just one too-quick tug by my daughter part of the ring broke - not enough to make it useless, but it was annoying nonetheless. Clearly, this is a toy piece that is in need of a serious redesign.
Cleanup is generally easy. When wet the paint wipes off easily with a little soap and water or glass cleaner. When dry, it acquires a slightly rubbery feel and can be peeled off the plastics with a minimum of effort. For more severe cleaning a trip to the kitchen sink provides a good cleaning environment. It's important to note that the paint dries fairly quickly, and when dry the paint is fairly permanent on porous surfaces like clothes and carpeting. When wet you can quickly soak it and scrub it and get 98% of it out, but once it's dry you pretty much have to live with a stain.
Overall, this is an excellent toy with just a few quicks and shortcuts that make it a little annoying, but not annoying enough where I wouldn't recommend it to other parents (and kids).
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Fun for all ages!May 29, 2008
By Ohio Girl
"Moms just want to have fun!!"
I highly recommend it especially for the low Amazon sale price! My 6 year old daughter and 4 year old son both love it, want to do more and more art with it and both have a very easy time operating it and they get beautiful results every time. Even my 1 1/2 year old son loves watching it work. I even have fun doing it and we will definitely use our art to make cards for family/friends or just hang up and enjoy. The only drawback is it is a little time consuming peeling off the paint from the unit after it has dried already, but hey, there's cleanup involved w/ any art project so it's to be expected. I read on another review that the paint stains fabric, but I didn't find that the paint flies around too much, so none of us got any paint on our clothing. Also, I like the paint they include since is dries really nice and doesn't crack/peel like other cheap children's craft paint. Buy it and enjoy! :-)
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 Fun and easyDec 30, 2007
By Karl Radke
Kids love it and it's easy to set up and a minor challenge to clean with dye-fast colors. The colors DO NOT come out of clothing so I'd recommend getting a different type of base for the pigments when dealing with this toy. It takes up little space and clean-up is pretty easy. Overall, we love it.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
The best toy for all my grandchildrenAug 09, 2009
By M. Meyer
"toys r us on wheels"
I have 5 grandchildren whose ages range from 2 to 7 (2 boys and 3 girls) and I'm always looking for fun things to do with them when I visit. This product was a gold mind. They all LOVED playing with this toy. It's creative, fun and exciting. My one grandson (age 4) was so excited, he kept jumping up and down the entire time we played with it. He kept saying "I love this game - it's so much fun!!!" I highly recommend this for children who love to use paints and are looking to tap into their creative minds. Very easy for the children to use and assembly is quick and easy. I plan on buying this product so we can play with it again very soon.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 it's fun but not a great valueNov 25, 2011
By Carol C.
"ccjello"
This toy is plenty entertaining for a short while. It is great fun to make the art, and the paint colors are bright and contemporary (neon green, yellow, coral, blue, and purple). The spinner is seemingly durable, powered by one C-cell battery (which is not included).
But, consider --
The bottles of ink are teeny-weeny -- .6 fl oz each -- about the size of a small hotel shampoo bottle. The jars of glitter are even tinier. Although the kit contains glitter, there is no glue to apply it. The glitter seems like a bit of an afterthought. And for some reason, even though there are five colors of paint, spinner device contains only three holes to hold the paint.
The cards to paint on are tiny as well -- there are ten cards that are about 4"x 4" each, and another ten cards that are about 3" x 3". Half are black and half are white. You may be able to make "beautiful art" (says so right on the box) but at 3" x 3", it's hard to make much of a statement.
The kit contains a clear plastic "splash guard" That is labeled in tiny font as such, along with a "do not discard" warning. If you happened to overlook the label, you would likely discard the splash guard, as it is indistinguishable from much packaging.
I have a similar spin-art painter from Crayola, the color spinner -- hard to say which one of these two items would be preferable. This Alex spinner is battery-operated, the Crayola one is not. This Alex spinner definitely has cooler paint colors. The Crayola spinner has circular pieces of cardboard to paint on. They are much larger and the shape is more interesting. Either kit would be fun for kids. Once or twice.
This would be a fun toy to play with once or twice, but I wouldn't expect it to be something you will return to again and again. And if you purchase it, don't forget to get a C-cell battery.
See all 32 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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Sensory Interventions was designed primarily to help parents and therapists find appropriate child therapy toys for helping children with Sensory Processing Disorders to develop Sensory Integration and acheive their maximum potential. Sensory Interventions carries many developmental toys which are also useful as Sensory Toys for Autism and Occupational Therapy Toys for Special Needs Children of all exceptionalities. Having had experience as a teacher, a sibling, and a parent of children with special needs, we at Sensory Interventions understand how complicated life can be and how so often, you just need a simple and sensible solution for your child's needs. At Sensory Interventions, we hope that we can provide a helpful and convenient source for one stop shopping and information for those special parents of children with special needs. As you travel down this special path, hand in hand, with your special child, we pray your journey will be "sensational." |
