$28.49
Brand: Humongous Entertainment
Format: CD-ROM
Details: Amazon.com
Steve and Blue need your help creating art for “The Really Big Art Show.” Will you help them? Create an abstract mural with Chalk Girl, construct a diorama with Al Luminum, illustrate a storybook with Periwinkle, and more. In five learning activities, explore abstract and traditional art forms, color, texture, and composition. Strengthen prediction, estimation, and problem-solving skills. In the end, you’ll have your own art portfolio, thanks to Blue’s Art Time Activities.
Review
Steve and Blue, the gifted-and-talented Nickelodeon pup, are preparing for “The Really Big Art Show” at Blue’s school and invite kids to join them in making art projects for the show. This high-quality title provides a cute and playful context for what really is so much more than just another simple kid’s draw-and-paint program. Instead, it’s a well-tooled and compelling computer art program that introduces kids to art basics such as color mixing, design and layout, while encouraging them to be both innovative and color-between-the-lines structured. Five activities involve kids in different mediums. One of the finest is helping Periwinkle the cat complete pictures in any of seven picture storybooks using easier-to-do stamps or free-style paints, or mixing the modes. Marky Marker needs help finishing the art show invitations, an activity that enables young Picassos to resize images, overlay colors and make general design decisions. The color mixing game’s lets youngsters combine colors to create secondary and tertiary colors (from basic green to aquamarine) in order to progress in a boardgame-like challenge that grows more complex through 10 levels. Al Luminum’s recycle bin diorama workshop presents a different kind of art–sculpting from junk–and introduces the concept of making something from a blueprint.
An improvement would be to replace the confining chalkboard activity with a wild and unstructured free paint project where kids could use what they have learned elsewhere in the program on from-scratch works.
Reviewed by Don Oldenburg, Parents’ Choice® 2001 — From Parents’ Choice®
UPC: 042725199904
Release Date: 28-08-2000
Package Dimensions: 38x241x498
