Canal Toys Airbrush Plus Wildcat Review

Reviewed by Amanda Hayes

The days are getting shorter, evenings are getting darker, and Autumn feels like it’s on its way. With Autumn comes more rainy and cool days with children spending longer at home or indoors, so no doubt you will be looking for fun and creative things to do to reduce the time spent on screens.

One of the fabulous things that my son has been sent to review lately is an Airbrush Plush cuddly animal from Canal Toys. These come in three variations, a unicorn, wildcat and puppy, and we were sent the wildcat. I must admit I wasn’t sure what to expect from a paintable soft toy, but it has proved a big hit at home.

The Airbrush Plush kit comes in a colourful box, which matches the colours of the paints inside, and contains the soft toy, 120 reusable stencils, an airbrush gun and four airbrush colour pens. Before you get started you need to insert two AA batteries into the airbrush gun, luckily, we had a few in the drawer, so after taking ages to find the tiny screwdriver, we finally got started. It’s super simple to use, remove the lid and push the desired coloured pen into the airbrush gun, turn the switch to on and you can spray to your hearts content. We did ours out in the garden as we had a fine day, but for inside use I would recommend using a cardboard box or similar as backing to catch any excess spray.
The kit comes with 120 stick on stencils, which you will be able to use at least several times each, depending on how careful your child is. There are more than enough to do lots of different designs and range from stars to skull & crossbones. The are very easy to use, just peel off the backing and stick to the toy, they don’t slip as the adhesive sticks to the fur.

The plain white soft toy itself is a generous size and really soft and squidgy, the only plastic bit is the sparkly eyes, so it makes for a lovely cuddly pet with or without the paint. The design looked really good after it was done, and my son was desperate to have another go, so ran off to wash it straight after. It did exactly what it said on the box and went straight back to white, we were really impressed. Unfortunately, now you have to wait until its dry to start again, which seemed a long wait when he was so keen to do another design. We learnt the hard way that if It’s not totally dry the paint will smudge or come off on your clothes, but don’t worry too much it does wash out.

If you child loves soft toys, as mine does, and enjoys art this is a perfect creative toy or gift. The only thing that I would change is a greater selection of colours in the paint. You can buy refills, but these only seem to have one extra colour, it would be great to have a choice of deep blues, yellow or red. It’s a minor point though and overall we thought it was a great toy. Highly recommended.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

RRP: £20.00 This product can be purchased from any good toyshop; more information here.