[.uk] Disney's Magic Artist Deluxe

Amazon.com Review:
If you have a young graphic artist in the house, odds are that you have already seen a range of paint programs for children. All offering a collection of templates for art projects, clip art to use with the templates, and some basic drawing tools for users who wish to go freestyle, these programs' primary differences have been in their look and user friendliness... at least until now. Disney's Magic Artist Deluxe is one of a new generation of programs designed for users who enjoy creating art with computer assistance. In addition to the standard-issue graphic tools, this package makes artwork into a game, with moving animations, sound effects, and some very thoughtful design features. While earlier graphics programs often resembled scaled-down versions of adult packages, this one is entirely bent on entertaining children and encouraging sprees of creative electronic drawing. Its kit is full of brightly colored, genuinely wacky tools, including robots that run around the screen drawing patterns on your page and a sprayer that drops animations into the page. Imagine watching cookies bake onscreen, spreading a line of crawling spiders across a page, or planting roses along the bottom of the screen. Just watching these images mutate to their finalized form is delightful--and they come with topnotch sound effects and a good dollop of humor, too. Another area where older graphics programs broke down was in their reusability factor. Once a child had seen and used all of a package's available images, it was often time to move on to the next contender. However, Disney's Magic Artist Deluxe offers regular updates. Users can download new graphics and animations from the program's Web site, including packages designed particularly for a coming holiday or event. For users uninterested in using prepackaged art, Disney's Magic Artist Deluxe also offers a full set of tools to allow kids to import pictures of themselves and their friends, and then to decorate, alter, and distort them to their heart's content. Whether they want to build static scenes with Disney characters, construct animated tableaus, or digitally bend an existing favorite photograph, this is a graphics program certain to please artistically bent kids and their parents through project after project. --Alyx Dellamonica

Amazon.com Product Description:
Discover the tools to bring art to life. Disney's Magic Artist Deluxe is an interactive art studio featuring effects and wacky tools to give kids the power to create their own art. Play with the Blender that mixes up colors and textures with the push of a button, or try a Texture Pumper that gushes out five different 3-D designs. Create desktop patterns with the Tile Tool or give the Pastry Tool a squeeze to squirt frosting and sprinkle on toppings. The features are easy to use with streamlined navigation to make importing, exporting, and printing simple. Get access to exclusive animated stamps, props, and backgrounds online and create Web-ready artwork. Bring the canvas to life with exploding fireworks, baking cookies, flying butterflies, and more. Even scan and edit photos into crazy creations. E-mail friends for an instant online art exhibit.

Great Program / Have to play with Administrator Account:
Terrific program with tons of stuff to play with. My kids love it. Each tool can be clicked to bring up another alternate tool which provides even more cool art abilities. This is one of the best programs I have ever seen. Your kids will really love it. My only gripe is the program can not be played under Windows XP with "limited" account types. I don't want to give my 3 and 4 year olds administrator rights just to play one game. So they have to play under my administrator account which kind of defeats the purpose of having separate user accounts.

Great Software:
Much better program than the Disney's Magic Artist orignial editon. We upgraded to this version when the older one wouldn't work properly for our computer. We are very happy and would highly recommend this one. My 4 year old daughter loves it!!!

Endless Entertainment!:
I was shocked at the amount of content in this program. You can paint with everything from spaghetti and meatballs to balloon figures! The sounds are delightful! You can use all of the characters and settings. Every time my five year old plays with this, we discover something new! We've even been known to fire it up while our daughter is sleeping! I highly recommend this program. I have Vista and it works well.

Probably really great, but...:
Just received the CD ROM in the mail and opened it up to put in my disk drive and... it didn't work. Reason - because my computer is a Mac (Apple). On the product description it lists the many systems that it is compatible with including Macs (listed 2nd after Linux). Unfortunately this is not entirely true. I suppose if I install bootcamp and buy Windows Vista (or the like) I would be able to open the program. Just a warning to Mac users about this problem. I have an older version that worked only on OS 9 classic but I don't have classic anymore. My little son was so disappointed when the program wouldn't work on our Mac computer. Still looking for a compatible version. Hope they come out with universal new version soon.

Great:
It has alot of options to be creative. The only thing I wanted to see was coloring pages so young kids can also use it. Great Buy Overall.