It offers kids numerous and imaginative activities, as well as hours of creative fun. Macworld’s Buying Adviceįor $30, Kid Pix Deluxe 3 is a worthwhile purchase. Additional projects include making a slideshow, creating a digital storybook, and uploading QuickTime or Flash movies and still images to the Kid Pix Web site for others to see. What will this day bring?” The question is answered by completing the comic strip. A young boy’s voice says, “In the shadow of the mountains a tiny village is waking up. Choose Mountain Village, for example, and a partially drawn comic strip with an Alpine scene and empty voice bubbles appears. The Idea Machine jumpstarts imagination with activities that include coloring book-style templates of insects and animals, project worksheets, and unfinished comic book strips. Kid Pix Deluxe 3 is a great tool that both educators and parents can use to inspire kids’ creativity through making multimedia art. And the variety of actions, including drawing with 3-D effects, using scalable graphic objects, and painting by voice, ensures a high level of continued interest and challenge. A wide selection of background images and paper textures, along with stickers and animations, make creating art in the program fun and easy. Special effects, patterns, and graphics are added by importing GIF, JPEG, PICT, and BMP files from other programs. One of Kid Pix’s strongest aspects is that it involves building on images, objects, and animations.
For a young learner, Kid Pix is an inexpensive way to become acquainted with the tools used to create art, before parents shell out a lot of cash on supplies. Real-world art supplies are mimicked: paint creates shadows and appears in globs on the canvas and color strokes are complete with brush marks.
Unfortunately, the new Email Your Art feature was unreliable during our testing. Although this feature is more a novelty than a real tool, it’s fun to use and may have particular appeal to kids who don’t yet use a mouse. This way, kids’ squeals and laughter become a part of their artwork. The new Sound Art feature goes beyond its built-in ability to add sounds to work and allows users to import sounds directly using a microphone.