The New button has a depiction of a clean sheet of paper on it, making it easy for children to understand its function. After lots of scribbling, I showed her how to get a “clean piece.” This requires a few button clicks, but I had to show her only once. I began by showing my granddaughter how to hold the first mouse button depressed to make marks. There’s documentation on the Tuxpaint Web site, where you’ll also find an interesting gallery of user contributed pictures and videos. You can download Tuxpaint for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. She’s too busy trying to work the program to draw a picture. Even with constant help she seems too overwhelmed by the interface to let her creativity flow. She appears lost and loses interest almost immediately. Her experience with the GIMP is similar, yet exacerbated by the multi-window format. Even starting a new picture is a bit of chore, as it requires several steps with dialog. Even selecting colors seems confusing for her due to the small size of the selector and the gradient layout. All the toolbar buttons are small and hard to interpret. Adjusting the size in the Settings Toolbar is too much for a three-year-old who doesn’t read. The Paint button is obvious, but it defaults to a small size. mtPaint is a great application, but for my granddaughter the interface is confusing, and she requires help to invoke the simpliest function. Although she’s a quick study, the interfaces and some procedures were too complicated for her to master within her attention span. On occasion when I was booted into a system without Tuxpaint, my granddaughter tried to use what was available. I noticed early on that she had inherited her father’s interest in art, and one night I decided to see if Tuxpaint would be of any interest to her. For a long time Frozen Bubble (“Penguins” she calls it), Fish Fillets (“Fishies”), and Njam (“Monsters”) were her favorites, but lately they seemed to stimulate her for only a few minutes before she was back to the old-school crayons, coloring books, and paper. Our discovery came when my granddaughter began to grow bored with the games she’d been playing. Tuxpaint delivers fun and education with hardly any learning curve. With the program’s large, colorful, easy-to-interpret buttons and cute sound effects, your youngster can become an artist. Tuxpaint is a drawing program designed specifically for children. A friend of mine laughed at us and stated that I’d “have her compiling kernels by the time she was three.” Well, she’s three years old now, and though she’s not compiling kernels yet, she is having hours of fun on her own thanks to Tuxpaint. She was only a few months old when she became interested in the mouse and began learning to place the cursor on the screen. My granddaughter has been sitting on my lap at the computer since before she could even hold herself up.
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