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I must admit I've never had so much fun with a utility program as with this one. Paintbox enables you to make up your own UDGs with ease, plot and draw by simple cursor movements, fill in your drawings and save screens for use in your programs. It is written by Joe Gillespie for the 48K Spectrum and is supplied with an easy-to-follow instruction booklet.

It won't make you an artist overnight but, after a couple of hours of loading the tape and reading the instructions, I managed to draw a picture... I may not be Picasso, but Paintbox does have more serious applications. As an aid in drawing graphs or in technical drawings and so on.

Once you have loaded the tape, you are presented with a menu. From there you can view the available UDG bank; there are up to 84 user-defined characters in store.

If you don't like the available choice, you can invent your own by calling up the drawing board. This enables you to plot your shape on an 8x8 grid by using a cursor. Once made, you then store it in one of the four banks.

Another facility on the menu is "Sketch pad". Here you can practise building up a picture using UDGs before entering them onto your main picture. To build up your picture you first hit the 'Precision Plotter' key. Now the fun bit starts.

You are presented with a blank screen apart from a cursor which can either by moved via the keyboard or a joystick. In the bottom right hand of the screen you are given an X and Y coordinate of the cursor. To draw a lne you move the cursor to where you want the line to start and press the PLOT key. Moving the cursor to the place where you want the line to end and pressing the DRAW key will instantly produce your line.

Paintbox has facilities to draw circles and arcs and in radial mode, will return the cursor to the start of your line; ideal if you are drawing a spoked wheel. Once you have outlined your picture, you can shade in any of the parts with different ink colours. Finally, you can put on your UDGs to complete the picture.

If you make a mistake you can edit your last command. As you build up your picture it can be stored in memory and recalled at any time. Your picture can then be stored on tape and reproduced either as a SCREEN$ or as memory bytes. It's possible to store up to five screens and this will leave you with about 6K of memory.

To give you some idea what is possible with this program, have a look at one of the colour adverts in your magazine and take a close look at some of the drawings. With a little practice, you will find that it's quite possible to draw pictures of that standard.

The tape costs £7.50 and I think you'll find it's the best £7.50s worth you have ever spent. Print n Plotter products also sell some support hardware to go with it such as key overlays and a jotter pad.