Drawing For Children is a free drawing application designed specifically for children. It would be easy to think that any very basic drawing application would be ideal for children, but there's more to Drawing For Children than that. Tools and features have been included that offer a wide range of ways for users to draw, but they're not complicated by having various different options for changing the way that a tool works.
Highlights of Drawing For Children
Drawing For Children has a range of features that should keep young users interested for some time.
- Child Proof mode puts the application in full screen mode and removes some controls
- Simple pre-set pencils and brushes for drawing
- Add stamps from different groups of types
- Small selection of easily resized clip-art and frames
- Add text to images with different effects
- Apply one click special effects, such as color invert and blur
- Simple method for saving pictures to a default folder
Why Use Drawing For Children
Drawing For Children is obviously aimed at children and, while I'm slightly outside of the target demographic, I think the developer has done a good job of presenting a clear and easily explorable user interface. Children are generally quite inquisitive and I'm sure that young users will very quickly find their way around. The Draw Stamps and Draw Cliparts tools can make it easy for less confident users to achieve results very quickly and this may help to ease them into experimenting more with the other tools on offer.
With almost all tools having no options for customization, it really is just a case of selecting a tool and drawing with it. With some of the Special Effects, just a click is sufficient to see the result. The Draw Text tool is the one feature that can be adjusted, with the option to change font size and type, but this aspect is actually turned off by default.
The application has a Child Proof mode that puts the application in full screen mode and limits the ability for a child to fiddle with any other aspects of the computer other than the drawing area. This is potentially quite a useful feature, though it isn't fool-proof and it is possible to drag the bottom of the window up and reveal the Windows menu bar.
While aimed at young users, Drawing For Children could be a useful tool for older users looking to replicate the drawings of their childhood. The simple flying bird and tufts of grass scatter brushes particularly reminded me of some of the great art that I produced as a child.
Some Limitations of Drawing For Children
Considering its target audience, there's little to criticize about Drawing For Children. It only allows one Undo step which may be frustrating for some users, though that is arguably one more step than with pen and paper.
The only other thing that I noticed, and this is unlikely to be a real issue for most users, is that I was unable to take a screen shot while using Drawing For Children.
Help and Support
The Help is fairly limited, but on the other hand it's probably as comprehensive as necessary. There is a little information offered and anything that is vitally important is covered in the brief notes, however this really is an application for children to play and experiment with.
You can download your own free copy from the Drawing For Children website.