A blue plastic paint box with twelve round cakes in two rows of six and a wooden-handled brush lying in the channel between them. The brush is printed SHARK, the same mark as the box. The clear lid hinges back and is moulded into a grid of mixing wells rather than being left flat.

Those wells are what separates this from the two cheaper trays on our shelf. A flat lid gives you one surface, so every mix runs into the last one and the third colour you make is brown. A moulded grid keeps each mix in its own square, which means a child can lay out four or five shades before starting and still tell them apart halfway through.

Rs. 350 for twelve colours is Rs. 29.17 a colour — roughly double our Kaidisi tray at Rs. 15 and our Clever palette at Rs. 13.33. The wells and the wooden brush are what the doubling buys. Whether that is worth it depends on whether the painting involves mixing at all: for filling in a printed outline it plainly is not, and for anything with a sky in it, it is.

The twelve are the full primary spread and then some: red, orange, green, blue, brown and black across the top; a deeper blue, yellow, light green, purple, gold and white below. Both ends of the range are there, so a colour can be lightened with the white instead of being watered down until the paper shows through.

The brush is worth a word. It is a proper wooden handle with a shaped ferrule rather than the moulded plastic stick that usually comes taped into a cheap tray, and it is long enough for a child to hold at a sensible distance from the bristles rather than gripping it like a pencil.

We list this set from 5 years up. The Safencia price is Rs. 350 with Cash on Delivery across Pakistan, and stock, your city and delivery charges are confirmed on WhatsApp before dispatch.

Why this product is worth considering