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