How to nurture your child's inner artist

This post is brought to you by Nuffnang and Crayola.

Now that I have both an infant and a toddler, I am constantly looking for ways to entertain Ellie so that I can tend to Jimmy without distractions. There's only so much reading we can do, and I'm guilty of putting on a Disney movie more often than I'd like to admit (I know all the words to Frozen, not to mention Nemo, Despicable Me, Monsters Inc and Shrek!) but I also like to let Ellie bust out her inner creative as often as possible too. One thing Ellie loves to do right now is to draw (look at her first recognisable drawing here!).

However, as parents with toddlers can probably attest, my house is also littered with evidence of her growing attachment to adding artistic flair to everything! See some examples below:

Spot probably didn't have as much fun as Ellie did - 

Her couch - 

Biro, and assorted food stains too, on my dining chairs -

Marker which I noticed too late to remove so now permanently on my dining table - 

There are also drawings on my ugg boots, the shelves in her playroom, several of my quilt covers, uncountable items of clothing, and at one stage, Toby our white dog sported some lovely pink highlights throughout his fur. It doesn't matter if I give her markers, pencils, crayons... she finds a way to transfer art to something she shouldn't. It's very hard to be too cross with her when discovery goes something like this:

Me: Ellie, did you do this?
Ellie: Yes, I did
M: Why did you do it?
E: I was drawing and I was naughty. Mama, can you please clean it off now?

I love that my toddler still believes I can fix everything for her, but I am getting tired of trying to remove drawings from lots of things in my house. I was therefore over the moon when Crayola offered to send me some of their Color Wonder products. Whoever came up with the concept obviously was a parent with a toddler I'm thinking! The markers have a special non-toxic ink in them that only appears when used on the Color Wonder paper. Hurrah! That's right, it doesn't show up because it's clear on skin, furniture, carpets and regular paper.

Ellie was super excited to receive a Disney Frozen pack. Each pack comes with 5 different coloured markers in colours to suit and 18 pages to colour in. When you use the marker on the special paper, the colours appear on the page. It's a bit hard to explain, so I took a little video of her doing her colouring in thing to demonstrate - probably best not to have the volume up too loud as it ends with her doing a triumphant  "There!" exclamation.

She really wanted me to put up the video where she is colouring AND singing Frozen's "Let it Go" at the same time, but I don't think the Internet is ready for that just yet!

I have to say, this is one of my favourite products at the moment, so much so that I've hidden all of her regular pens away for awhile. I love that I can sit her down to do colouring, and the fact that she's being quiet doesn't mean trouble and random colouring, just that she is really getting into the moment! If you have an indiscriminately artistic child and you need a pack of these, you can find stockists via the Crayola website.

Do you have an artist at your house? Let me know in the comments where your little artist has created somewhere they shouldn't!

Disclosure: I received two packs of Crayola Color Wonder via Nuffnang to review. All opinions expressed in this post are my own and I received no payment for this review.