Kids' Art Supplies: What to Buy for Drawing and Painting
Amazon's whole arts and crafts chart is children's drawing supplies, three identical glue sticks, and — genuinely — essential oils at number one.
Gleipnir was made from six impossible things and came out looking like a silk ribbon. The dwarves who made it did not send up something that looked strong. They sent up something that looked like nothing at all.
Anyone who has watched a four-year-old ignore an expensive craft kit and spend an hour with a biro and the back of an envelope has seen the same principle at work.
The craft chart is a children’s art chart
Amazon’s Arts, Crafts and Sewing chart, read this morning. Its top fourteen:
- Glue sticks at four, five and eight — three separate listings of the same Elmer’s disappearing purple stick in different sizes.
- Paint markers at two and thirteen, both ARTISTRO 36-sets.
- Acrylic paint at three. Crayons at seven. A sketchbook at twelve. Gel pens at fourteen.
- Rhinestones at six, jewellery glue at ten, a pencil case at eleven.
- Essential oils at one and nine.
Set the oils aside for a second. Everything else in that list is a child’s drawing table. Not one sewing product. No yarn, no fabric, no needle, in the chart named for sewing.
That tells you who is actually buying, and it is worth knowing before you shop it: this is a chart of things adults buy for children, in September, and it is priced and sized accordingly.
What to buy first
The useful shape of a kids’ art supply is low setup, high tolerance for being left out overnight. Ranked by that, and by what the chart is telling us people actually rebuy:
- Paper first. It is the thing that runs out, and a bound book beats loose sheets because it survives.
- Crayons. Zero setup, no mess, works from age two, and the box has not needed improving in sixty years.
- Acrylic craft paint once a child wants colour that covers. Cheap enough per bottle that a spill is annoying rather than expensive.
- Paint markers last, and only when the child is old enough to cap a pen. They are the most capable thing on the list and the least forgiving of being left open.
Glue is the thing to buy more of than you think. Three of the top eight are the same glue stick, in three sizes, from one brand. That is not the chart being lazy — it is what the buying data looks like when a product is genuinely consumed.
Where these picks came from, honestly
All four read off Amazon’s own Arts, Crafts and Sewing chart this morning — the category root — rank, rating and review count together, best-sellers first. All four are research picks. The ordering advice is ours, and the observation that paper is the real constraint is the sort of thing anyone who has run a table of children through a wet afternoon will recognise.
The one honest warning
The number one product on the arts and crafts chart is peppermint essential oil, and number nine is tea tree oil. Neither is an art supply.
They are there because soap making, candle making and bath products are filed under crafts, and those categories buy oils by the bottle. It is a real market and the products are presumably fine for it.
The problem is what happens when a chart puts them at the top of a list that a parent is reading. Essential oils are not children’s craft materials, and several of the popular ones are actively unsafe around small children and pets — undiluted peppermint and eucalyptus are respiratory irritants for infants, tea tree is toxic if swallowed, and both are dangerous to cats even diffused. None of that is on the product page in a form a parent scanning a best-seller list would register.
This is the clearest example we have found of the underlying hazard in shopping any best-seller chart: the chart is a ranking of sales inside a category, not a recommendation for the person reading it. Two products can sit at numbers one and seven of the same list and be intended for entirely different humans.
Read what a thing is for. The rank will not tell you.
The picks
Crayola crayons, 24 count, 2-pack
Number seven on Amazon's Arts, Crafts and Sewing chart this morning, 4.8 stars across twelve thousand ratings. Twenty-four colours is the box that has been correct for sixty years: enough range that a child is not fighting the materials, few enough that they are not choosing instead of drawing. Two packs is the honest quantity, because half of them will be broken by December.
- Best for
- Anyone from about two upward, and the drawer by the kitchen table where art actually happens.
- Watch out
- Buy the plain 24 rather than the 96 with the sharpener. The very large boxes are bought by adults and used by nobody; a child who has run out of colours in a 24 has been drawing for a year, which is a good problem.
Apple Barrel acrylic paint, assorted colours, 2 oz
Number three, 4.7 stars across forty-six thousand ratings — the most-reviewed paint on the chart by a distance. Small bottles of craft acrylic in a wide colour range: it covers, it dries fast, it goes on paper, card, wood, rocks and terracotta pots, and a spilled bottle is not a disaster.
- Best for
- Anything that is not paper, school projects, rock painting, and the age where a child wants colour that actually covers rather than washes out.
- Watch out
- Acrylic is permanent on fabric once dry, and "washable" is not what these are. That is the trade for the coverage. Aprons, an old shirt, and not the good tablecloth — and wash the brushes before they set, because a set acrylic brush is finished.
ARTISTRO dual-tip acrylic paint marker pens, 36 set
Number two, 4.4 stars across five thousand ratings, and the format that has changed kids' art more than anything else in a decade: acrylic paint in a pen, with a fine tip at one end and a chisel at the other. No water, no palette, no brush to clean, and it writes on the dark and awkward surfaces that ordinary markers cannot.
- Best for
- Rocks, mugs, canvas shoes, dark paper, and any project where the setup was the thing that stopped it happening.
- Watch out
- Its 4.4 is the lowest score of the big sellers in this top ten, and paint markers are prone to the same two faults across every brand: they need shaking and priming before the paint flows, and a tip left uncapped dries out for good. Neither is a defect, both frustrate children.
Soucolor sketch book, 9 by 12 inch, 100 sheets
Number twelve, 4.8 stars across ten thousand ratings. A hundred sheets of paper heavy enough to take marker and light paint without bleeding through, bound so it does not scatter. The unglamorous truth of children's art supplies is that paper is the constraint far more often than colour is, and a bound book is the difference between drawings that get kept and drawings that get lost.
- Best for
- Everyday drawing, car journeys, and giving one child their own book instead of a communal pile.
- Watch out
- It is drawing paper, not watercolour paper — anything genuinely wet will cockle it. And 9 by 12 is bigger than a small child's reach; for under-fives a smaller book gets used more.
We do not list prices; they change daily. The button opens the current Amazon page.