Kidzaw.com Master Kitz The Starry Night

This (last?) review of the TOS Review Crew 2018 year is a fun one! Kidzaw.com has put together some fabulous art kits for your young (or older) artist, inspired by the Masters. We were sent the Master Kitz The Starry Night, which, if you know your art titles, is obviously from Van Gogh. This made me very happy, as well as his older sister, who is an Art Ed major, and a fan of van Gogh. As a matter of fact, one of her major projects last year was a collage of the precursor to The Starry Night, and right now she is painting in oils a pair of old boots. So it's a lot of fun to have them both doing Van Gogh inspired projects at the same time, albeit 7+ hours apart. ;)

Van Gogh on the Left, Eldest on the Right for both pieces

If you visit the Kidzaw Website you will find more kits inspired by Klee, Kadinsky, Klimt, Monet, Rouge, and Hokusai. Each kit comes in a very nice, self-contained, magnet closure box, as you see here:

Inside this particular box, we found two pieces of deluxe art paper and a large Starry Night Cyprus Tree (Both rolled up, the stencil is green...) Washable (Yes! It comes off hands very well!) Blue, Black, and White Acrylic paint, 4 oil pastels (white, yellow, orange, and dark blue~ apparently the kit has been updated with a 5th, light blue pastel as well), low tack star sticker mask sheet, a Van Gogh texture roller, a sponge roller, instructions and a colorful information sheet. The Van Gogh roller has a protective covering on it when it arrives (as you see in my unboxing photo), but it has a nice texture to give the feel of Van Gogh's strokes. 

So, we are * almost done with this project~ There are a few steps involved, not the least of which is getting the paper and the stencil to lie flat (Paper is easy~ tape it down. The Stencil was a little more tricky, and after having it flat on the table overnight with the box and a few things stacked on top of it, we still needed to use tiny rolls of masking tape in strategic areas to get it to lie flat on the paper). I'll go over the process as we followed the included instructions. 

First, the star masks are placed on the upper half of the paper, then the entire paper is covered with Van Gogh strokes with the roller using blue paint, followed by a "cloudy" layer with white paint.
The star masks are removed, and when the paint is dry the stencil is laid down and the sponge roller is used to apply black paint.

After waiting for it to dry (It really is very fast-drying paint), the stencil is removed, and it is time to apply the oil pastels.

This is one of the places where we have figured out how we want to do things differently on the second piece of paper.
Probably do a blue sponge layer of paint first.
A darker layer with the Van Gogh roller of blue and black paint mixed across the top, but stopping more halfway, because we found the oil pastels didn't cover quite as well as we'd hoped.

And this is as far as we've gotten at this point. The pastels definitely take a little more concentration and time. I will say, that looking at this as a photo, from a distance, it looks much better than looking at it up close in person, which is often the way of impressionist art. :)

I am always a fan of well-done art kits that engage kids in the process and create an interest in the specific artist. Because of my Eldest's major, we do have a lot of discussion and exposure to art and artists, and Youngest was pleased to be doing something that coordinated with his big sister. I think this would be a fabulous gift to give to any aspiring young artist.

Not So Nutty Nitty Gritty 

• Company: Kidzaw.com
• Product: Master Kitz The Starry Night
• Ages: ? with help, as young as 5, but even at 11, I was assisting some.
• Price: $29.99

You can visit Kidzaw on their social media pages: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube

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Blessings~

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