| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ CREATION GRAPHIQUE ★ ADVANCED OCP ART STUDIO ★ |
The Advanced Art Studio aims to correct the short comings of the earlier Rainbird offering. Jill Lawson, our own digital Dali, takes a peek. Rainbird's original OCP Art Studio became available for CPC 6128 possessors in the latter part of 1986. Incorporating many sophisticated features, it provided excellent value for money (ACU November 1986). Now Rainbird has come up with Advanced Art Studio, which offers all the capabilities of the original version, plus many new and exciting characteristics. The screen layout is the same, with a double row of drop-down menu boxes. Selection is via the cursor keys and spacebar, but there is an option to define one's own choice of keys, use a joystick or mouse. The program comes with an extensive manual, but the majority of available functions are self-explanatory. Duplicate dump No alterations have been made to the printer dump section, and the file handling is similar, but now screens can be compressed when saved, allowing several more pictures to a disc. Colour palette selection is one of the areas where some of the most radical changes have taken place. As one would expect, two inks may be selected in Mode 2, four in Mode 1, and 16 in Mode 0, which is newly supported in this Advanced version. Each bar may be set to any one of the Amstrad's 27 colours, so that an ink may sequence through a maximum of 12 different colours at a speed determined by an indicator on a horizontal bar near the top of the screen. The colour of the border may be set in a similar fashion. Under the paint heading the choice of 16 pens remains the same, as do the spray sizes, but now spray can be fast, giving a thin distribution of dots, medium, or slow - which gives the densest coverage. The brush option is quite different to that in original Art Studio. The brush patterns and the textured fill patterns are linked, with a single pattern element available as a brush, or multiple elements "tessellated" to form a fill texture. A total of 15 new patterns may be designed at any one time, but frequently-used textures, such as stipple fills could be saved as separate files and re-loaded as necessary.
A pattern element (brush) is designed on a grid of height and width variable between one and 16 pixels. This is by far the most advanced and versatile system I have come across for pattern design, and is a delight to use. As previously, one can choose an elastic preview for lines and shapes. It is perhaps surprising that this is not the default choice, and I would have appreciated an on-screen reminder of the current foreground colour when in drawing mode. Extra extras Along with the new screen mode 0 there are two significant extras in the miscellaneous section. Firstly redo, which complements the undo function by allowing a preview of what will be undone. Although this is a valuable plus, I would have preferred a change to the undo, which, unlike other utilities, does not just remove what was drawn in the immediately previous operation, that is the last line or last area filled, but takes out everything back to the last drawing mode selection. The second item is the very useful ability to protect inks. Basically, this means that anything drawn in a "protected" ink is not obscured when drawing over it in a different colour. So scenery, for instance, can be drawn behind an object in the foreground so long as care is taken to do it in a colour not used in the object. Ink protection can apply to all drawing on screen, whatever the function, but it should be remembered that a protected ink does not constitute a boundary when performing a fill. Used with care, this is an extension which could prove invaluable. Layout of the windows menu has been revised, but only the abilty to save and reload windows is new. I believe that the finished version will be changed so that the current drawing ink will automatically become the current plot colour in the zoom modes. Conclusion In the space of only a few months this version of Art Studio succeeds in making the original "best buy for the CPC 6128" art studio look old-fashioned and out-dated. It is an absolute must for any aspiring artist, either as a stand-alone utility or as an excellent add-on to your favourite existing drawing program, because of the ease with which one can now swap pictures between studio and other utilities simply by saving or loading with an appropriate file name. If you own a CPC 6128 buy it. If you don't, buy a 6128! Jill Lawson, ACU #8705 |
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