Art Tutor - Castlesoft on PD 428
                 (Shareware utility for ST)

If you want to add graphics to your adventure but aren't artistic
by nature, it can be hard to know where to start. You load up your
art package and you know what you want to draw - an ominous
castle, for example - but all you have in front of you is an
extremely blank screen on your monitor or TV. What should you do
first? The chances are that if you just dive in and start clicking
blobs of colour with the mouse, the result is going to be less
than impressive, if not disastrous; not so much an ominous castle
as one that has been condemned by the local council.

Don't worry - here's comes Art Tutor, your personal art teacher on
a disk. It aims to take you through the whole process of drawing
pictures of all types, stage by stage, giving you the basic
principles that you can then apply to your own designs. The
package is shareware so you should register if you find it useful
and you can also pay a nominal amount for the optional, but very
useful, 56-page, illustrated manual. More details in a minute -
let's look at the disk first.

Once the program has loaded, you'll be presented with a menu in
the form of a board on an artist's easel.  The program is
mouse-controlled throughout and written using STOS.  The menu
options are:

1. Design 2. Heads 3. Cartoon 4. Body Language 5. Fantasy
6. Colour
plus 'quit', of course.

Selecting any of these takes you through that topic step-by-step.
You can page backwards to recap on points too, if you want, using
a forwards/backwards option at the bottom of the screen.

Selecting FANTASY gives a good idea of the way Art Tutor works. It
starts by taking 'dragons' as a theme and shows you how to draw
one.  First draw a grid, then copy over the planned design, square
by square, to give an outline of, in this case, a dragon with a
woman rider. Next, remove the grid, fill in any gaps and fill in
the main blocks of colour - black first, then red, yellow and
green.

I must admit that by this stage I had my doubts. Okay, there was a
dragon-shaped green blob on the screen with a recognisable head
blob at one end, a female outline sitting on it, and garish yellow
and red background. To say I wasn't impressed with the results so
far would be an understatement. But the next statement 'then add
detail' and the resulting final picture amazed me - it was
brilliant. Now that's what I CALL a dragon!

The rest of this section covers detailed drawing of a dragon's
head, design of aliens starting from a squid or a banana (yes, a
banana!) and a spaceship.

HEADS explains the proportion of a face, transferring this to a
grid again, an excellent drawing of an eye and the use of
digitized images as a basis for artwork. CARTOON goes further into
drawing faces and then looks at some well-known cartoon
characters, adapting the original designs to give them a twist.
Find out what Batman is afraid of! BODY LANGUAGE looks at the
basic skeletal and muscular structure of the human body and shows
the proportions of the different parts of the body, the so-called
'Golden Sections'.  It also shows how grids can be used to enlarge
pictures.

DESIGN tells you how to start with an idea, do a rough sketch,
make it into a cartoon, block fill with colour, then add detail.
Four examples are given. Finally COLOUR explains about primary and
secondary colours, harmonious and contrasting colours, colours to
express warmth or cold, the use of colour in optical illusions and
to give perspective, and provides a sample palette of flesh tones.
It's all very useful information, provided in an interesting and
entertaining way.  Quitting will allow you to run yet another
program with five more sections covering plants, animals,
vehicles, perspective and landscape. Any of the examples can be
saved to disk if you want to work with them yourself and
Castlesoft have provided an excellent art package, called Level
One, on the disk.

Registration details are on the disk. Castlesoft suggest a
contribution of œ5-œ10.  A further œ3 will get you a copy of the
manual which is well worth having for reference and further
explanation of certain sections. An even better art package, Level
Two, is also available to registered users, as is a slideshow
program. These are also reasonably priced.

Look out for the adventure Sword of Kings, due to be released in
the near future, hopefully as PD or shareware, which has used Art
Tutor when designing its excellent graphics.

Please note the address on the registration screen on the disk is
their old address. Castlesoft are now at Levenmouth Business
Centre, Riverside Road, Leven, Fife, KY8 4LT.
                                                        Sue