Artisan 1 is not a game, but a means to better games of your own. It is aimed to take the sweat out of defining your own characters using the VDU 23 command. Instead of laboriously planning out a shape, and calculating eight parameters yourself, Artisan 1 does the work for you.

What you get is two tapes, each with identical content on either side. The first contains the programs to load and run Artisan 1 and also includes a number of programs for demonstration purposes. The second has a number of pre-recorded shapes, graphics and foreign character sets, including a space shuttle, chess pieces and Greek, Japanese and Cyrillic alphabets.

Once you have loaded up the tape, you are faced with a design grid of 16 cells, with 1,024 pixels in all, on which you develop designs. Adjoining this is a mode 4 display which repeats the design in true size. In addition to this, a command menu is supplied.

The area at the foot of the screen displays any shapes you have saved in four rows of divided ASCII values, with an ASCII 'ruler' at the foot for easy noting of numbers.

Using cursor keys for positioning, you can set (fill in) and delete pixels to give the desired shape. Their counterparts 'fill' and 'erase' do this on a larger scale for whole cells.

The copy, invert, rotate and mirror commands give plenty of scope to play with different versions of a shape until you have the result you want. Shapes can be stored to and retrieved from cassette, our outputted to a printer.

The accompanying booklet contains clear instructions and a good step-by-step demonstration session and will repay careful study. Artisan 1 constantly improves with practice. Owners of Aries-20 boards may get loading difficulties if the board is on.