Modern Art: Creative Tech Toys for Little Artists
Kids are no longer limited to paint, crayons, glitter, and glue during creative playtime. Ever-emerging gadgets offer exciting new ways for kids to exercise their imagination and artistic side! Help your modern day artistes dabble in music, photography, animation, and art with these picks for the coolest artsy and creative toys and devices.
Kiddie Composers
Music is both educational and entertaining for little ones — a win-win! It’s the perfect medium to teach cause and effect, nurture creativity, and fine-tune hand/eye coordination (not to mention, making noise is always a hit with the pre-K crowd!).
Tech Toy Pick: The VTech Record and Learn KidiStudio is its own toddler recording studio, complete with a keyboard, a microphone, and tools to play back custom compositions as little ones explore different instruments, tempos, rhythms, and sounds.
Junior Photographers
It’s never too early to get into photography! This art form helps people of all ages tell their life story. Encourage your child to capture the world around her through photos, which will become a special time capsule of her childhood.
Tech Toy Pick: VTech’s Kidizoom Action Cam helps kids capture all their adventures! It fits the needs of explorers of all ages because it’s durable and waterproof, plus it easily mounts to helmets, bikes, skateboards, and scooters. Kids can take photos and videos with cool effects including stop-motion and time-lapse, as well as add a variety of frames and filters.
Animated Adolescents
Teens and tweens tend to have an unbreakable attraction to all things technology. Trade in their mindless scrolling for active creativity with an easy introduction to a new skill like stop-motion animation. They’ll learn the patience and planning that are necessary to write, execute, and produce even a short video clip. Plus, they’ll take pride in sharing the finished product on social media.
Tech Toy Pick: Hue Animation Studio helps tweens and teens bring art to life. The convenient kit includes everything needed to start animating the world around you, from camera to guidebook, backgrounds, and beyond. Kids can create, record, add special effects, edit frames, and share short videos to YouTube.
Artistic Teens
Art is an excellent medium for expressing emotions and developing an identity — both benchmarks of the teen experience. So many teens gravitate toward graphic design. It’s the perfect way to build an online archive of your teen’s growing artistic progression. Not to mention, it’s a marketable skill. Many of the technical tricks involved in the digital art world have real-world business applications that can make it more valuable than the average hobby.
Tech Toy Pick: The Wacom Intuos Drawing Tablet helps users turn their computer into a digital drawing canvas. This USB-connected tablet has a pressure-sensitive stylus that allows artists of all skill levels to draw, paint, and edit directly onto their screen, using a wide range of art supplies and styles in one easy tool.
There is true value in physically creating art out of traditional materials. Technology will never fully replace the thrill of that first splash of color on clean paper, or the fun of slicing and dicing with real scissors. And let’s face it: you’re not getting out of glitter entirely (sorry, Mom!). But modern technology offers an extra element to the art experience, so plug into new media to help your child creatively express herself in a whole new way.
Ashley McCann is a freelance writer and currently homeschools one of her young boys. She’s always on the lookout for creative ways to help her children develop new skills, and covers childhood development and family life for eBay.com.
