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Many years ago, when playing with jigsaws was more fun than VDU codes, I used to love painting by numbers. There were two main problems, however. The first was that I was too impatient to wait for the colours to dry so that they ran together. The other drawback was that each picture could only be painted once, so I couldn't experiment with colours as much as I liked. I would have loved a system which allowed me to dabble, change colours as I wanted and where every new day meant a fresh lot of clean pictures.

Well, rather late for me, but still good fun comes this tape which is compatible with both the Electron and BBC Micro. Although only priced at £9.95 - a modest enough figure nowadays - it contains no fewer than 18 pictures waiting for your artistic talents. The first four each have a file which allows the correct colours to be loaded onto the picture by first loading the picture file itself followed by the colour file. The remaining fourteen pictures do not have this facility, but this gives full rein to your imagination.

By the way, how many colours would you expect your Electron to support? Wrong! There is a palette of 35 available, including greys, pinks and so on and an area is easily filled using machine code. A cursor is moved around the screen, and on moving into the palette can select the painting colour. By then moving the colour to an area, it can easily be filled with the P (paint) key. Similarly, it may be re-coloured by D (delete), selecting another palette colour and then painting once more.

The speed of the fill is quite impressive as is the speed of the cursor. The picture as drawn is not final, as a mode may be selected in which it is possible to add lines exactly as required. Thus the picture of the clown might be improved by the addition of some balloons which can be added easily.

Indeed, it is quite possible and fun to go immediately into drawing mode without loading a picture, and thus create a picture from scratch which can then be coloured using the palette. The finished result can be saved to cassette.

An amusing but not over-useful feature is the facility to randomly alter the colours on a displayed picture, or to cycle through the basic colours in order.

The cassette box claims this program will interest those from six to 96. Well, my three and five year olds would like to be added to that list as they both think it's smashing fun.

I don't think they realise there is quite a large educational content to the program, with much evidence of planning, hand-eye co-ordination and discussion leading to the final polished result. Whether it would be of real practical use in schools on cassette is doubtful. There are so many parts of the program that it cries out to be put on disc for easier access of a particular picture, or for rapid saving of little Johnny's masterpiece. Apart from that reservation, I am most impressed.

Phil Tayler