Cotton Twist Watercolour Pencil Tin From 1303 Store Review

Reviewed by Amanda Hayes

If you are looking for stocking fillers for creative crafty children, small gifts for your child’s friends or an arty adult then Cotton Twist’s watercolour pencil tin is a great gift idea. My pencils were sourced from 1303 Children’s Store, a brand-new children’s concept store selling a selection of goods from independent brands.

The pencils come in a traditional pencil tin with push clasp lid, branded with colourful pencil illustrations and Cotton Twist presents wording in white. Inside the tin is a lovely little illustrated instruction card explaining how to dip & blend your pencils. It also gives you some ideas on how to mix the colours in your tin to result in other useful colours you may need for your painting. I love the fact that it reminds you to recycle the card instructions and not throw away by using the universal recycle diagram together with the wording.

Inside the tin is a wooden pencil sharpener, a short paintbrush and ten short pencils. The pencils are almost triangular in shape, with rounded edges, and a light wood colour. The end of each is coloured in the colour of the pencil, which makes them quick & easy to pick out of your tin. The ten colours are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, black, brown & pink. That pretty much covers all the colours you may need but watered down they easily mix and blend to form others.

Its fair to say, after trying these pencils out, that they are brilliant! So, so easy to use. I had a little bowl of water to one side and used it to dip my pencil in, and immediately they turned into vibrant watercolour paints. You need to dab the tip into a little water each time to get the paint effect, left dry they work just like pencils. The size makes them very user friendly for child or adult size hands and the triangular shape gives a good grip. Unlike using actual paints there is no mess, you don’t even need to put a table cover down as you don’t have a big jar of water to spill or paint to tip over and clean up. One thing my son used to do was add so much water that the paper soaks wet through and rips, using these pencils means that won’t happen. If you want to use a paintbrush to mix colours you do need a touch more water than just using the pencils on their own, but still not enough to soak the paper. If you prefer you can also blend the colours just using the wet pencils and not use the brush at all.

As the pencils were such good quality, I thought id check out the Cotton Twist website where I found a fab selection of stocking fillers and other party items starting at under £5.00. I then took a look at 1303 Children’s Store, where as well as the great quality Cotton Twist products, they have a lovely selection of quality children’s clothes, toys & games most of which I hadn’t seen before. If you like to shop off the high street, and get something slightly different to the normal, I suggest you check out their website for some great gift ideas.

Rating: Highly recommended 5 out of 5

RRP: £10.00 per tin.

This product can be purchased from 1303 Store here.