Description:
Some familiar and beloved storybook icons go electronic in Curious George Paint and Print Studio, an interactive sticker album aimed at children between the ages of 3 and 8. This easy-to-use program lets children create pictures featuring the Curious George characters and other graphics, all in the style of the originals, created by Margret and H.A. Rey. Paint and Print Studio provides users with a number of ready-made backgrounds to decorate, everything from Curious George's home to a circus. Within these environments, users can choose from a wide palette of graphical stamps, placing Curious George and his friends on the page. The user has total control over the scene; with toys, tools, and cartoon-style special effects, children can fill out any possible tableau. And, after illustrating your own Curious George epic on the computer screen, it is also easy to save favorite pictures or to output them on a color printer. A simple program with one or two relatively sophisticated options, Paint and Print Studio allows users to alter the angle and size of the prepackaged images before inserting them into the scene. If you want a tiny George on a massive pile of blocks (or an enormous George balanced on tiny blocks), you can have it. This little bit of flexibility allows for the creation of some enjoyably surreal images. There are also preset borders and some paint-program basics that permit further tweaking, such as the addition of lines, circles, and other shapes--even chunks of text. The archive of graphic stamps, while not exhaustive, is large and varied. What's more, some of the stamps are animated--when users set him onto a page, Curious George might dance, fall down, or fly a kite. These random animations will delight young players. Too strictly dedicated to Curious George to be useful as a more general paint program, Paint and Print Studio is nevertheless an excellent introduction to graphics-design software and the creative potential such programs can unlock. --Alyx Dellamonica
| 
