My children (not counting the baby) range in age from 4 to 15.  That makes activities that grab the attention of everyone few and far between — but this product did just that.

BlendyPens, from Chameleon Kidz, can be used just like any other marker.  However, they also include a unique locking chamber that pairs two markers (any two you choose) in such a way that you can blend the ink from the two, allowing for a wide variety of blends.  This particular set also includes a stack of “surprise art” pictures (more on that in a minute), a set of cardboard stencils, the “airbrush,” and a cardboard portfolio for storing your artwork.

The Airbrush

First let’s talk about the airbrush.  This is a very simple little tool, but a lot of fun.  Simply snap an uncapped BlendyPen into the airbrush, then hold it above your paper and blow through the tube to achieve airbrush effects.  You can do this with either a positive or negative stencil (we tried both ways), or just use it to create a textured look on your paper.

It’s really that simple, and the tool itself would be very easy to clean should it ever need it.

Blending

The primary feature of these markers is their ability to blend.  The way they do this is so simple I almost overlooked it.

BlendyPens don’t have regular caps.  Instead, they snap to blending chambers in pairs, and these chambers serve as the lids when the markers aren’t in use.  You can mix and match them any way you like, and they don’t mix unless/until you choose to blend them.  The blending chamber looks like this:

See how the tips are almost — but not quite — touching?  When you want to blend two colors, hold the marker pair upright with the darker color at the top, then twist the markers in opposite directions to bring their tips into contact with one another.  Hold it that way for a few seconds; as long as you’re holding the markers’ tips together, ink from the upper marker will absorb into the tip of the lower marker.  Now release, and you’re ready to uncap the lower marker and color with it.

In the image above, you can see the effect you get.  The swatch at the far left is the unblended pink marker; the second swatch is the unblended purple.  The longer swatches show what happens when I color with the marker after blending, beginning at the top left and working left-to-right and top-to-bottom.  The darker color gradually “fades out” of the mix as the blended ink is used up.

We did note that the artist has to be mindful of where s/he colors and in which direction.  Attempting to haphazardly fill in a large space after blending doesn’t work very well.  It’s best to work from one end of a section to another, or the inside out, etc.  In other words, keep the color moving in a single direction.  Otherwise you get weird patchy places like the blues my daughter used here:

She hasn’t switched markers.  She had simply blended in the darker blue, and when it wore off, it didn’t look quite like she’d hoped.

It can also work nicely to blend the colors for part of your artwork.  I found the blended effect worked very nicely on leaves.

Surprise Art

The surprise art alone was a huge hit with my kids.  (I’m hoping the company will come out with packages of surprise art pictures that can be purchased separately.  We finished all of ours in one day!)  These look, on the surface, like basic coloring pages, but they have special designs and patterns hidden in them in resist ink.  As you color, these extra images and patterns appear (like watercoloring over crayon drawings).

The younger children, especially, found these very exciting.  (Caleb was especially excited when “babies” appeared on his picture — faces inside a robot’s window.)  I imagine the surprise factor might be good motivation for younger children who balk at coloring, to encourage them to color and develop their fine motor skills.

Coloring these pages with these markers kept my 4-year-old, 6-year-old, 10-year-old, and 15-year-old all happily occupied at the table with Mama for an entire afternoon.  That’s a major win in my book.  (Fair warning, though, 4-year-olds don’t blend colors with quite the same logic as the older folks.  If you’re going to be using these a lot, it might reduce frustration for the little ones to have their own that can be something of a mess!)