Tess, a pattern-drawing programme, takes a bit of learning but is worth it. The idea is that you are presented with a white square on a black background and on this you create the picture of your choice using the user defined function keys.

Once you have drawn this basic pattern you can then "tessellate" or produce regular patterns of various sizes and colours. The range of possibilities is enormous and the basic patterns can be saved, loaded and used again to create yet more tessellations. The only criticism is that the instructions are not complete enough or, rather, they are all there but are not available during use.

A few "cribs" during the actual drawing stage would save a lot of mis takes when Tess is first used. Having said that, after a time the in structions become second nature and the pleasure of creating the tessella tions takes over.

Katherine James