Features:
- Send Kid Pix art to family and friends, even if they don't have Kid Pix
- Import a favorite photo and add special effects, colors, patterns, and graphics
- Create digital storybooks, multimedia movies, and comic books with art, sounds, music, and animation
- Paint colorful images using the volume and pitch of your voice (microphone required)
- Idea Machine gives help when starting a picture
Description:
With Kid Pix Deluxe Third Edition, your child can use his or her mouse, voice, and wildest imagination to create masterpieces on the computer. They'll go beyond mere virtual painting to smear, gloop, and smudge colors on a canvas that can be smooth, rough, or lizard-skinned. They'll use animated clip art, find psychedelic backgrounds, and even add music or sound effects to their creations. Then you'll send your kid to bed and start playing with Kid Pix yourself. It's that good. The program can feel a bit incomprehensible at first. After a quick installation, users encounter a screen with the usual icons--paintbrush, paint can, pencil. But there's also a cake mixer, a stick of dynamite, and a bald guy. All of this oddness is explained in the user's guide, but it's better to just jump into the right-brain spirit of this program and start clicking. Exploration reveals that the bald guy erases, while providing a running commentary, the mixer mixes colors, and the dynamite ignites, splutters, and then blows up the whole picture. Every tool here clanks, splooshes, or kerplunks, which makes Kid Pix Deluxe as close to tactile as a computer-painting program is ever going to get. On the practical side, there are templates for maps, charts, and reports that could be useful for school projects. Kids can also import their own photographs into the program, and tweak them as they see fit. Finished works of art can be put in a "slideshow," where auteurs can mess around with dissolves, fades, and more sound effects to complete their creations. One of the program's most unique features allows users to "paint" with their voices. Clicking and dragging while whispering and hollering into a microphone (not included) adds an interesting "performance art" element to the onscreen squigglings. Just be careful. We woke up our kids when we decided to see what our shouts looked like. (Ages 4 and older) --Anne Erickson
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