Pausing only to cut off his left ear, Steve Jarratt gives his post-impressionist views on Rainbird's Advanced Art Studio. Is it a giant among art packages or a mere Toulouse Lautrec?

A spring computer artists will no doubt be familiar with Rainbird's first steps into the world of pixel pictures, the OCP Art Studio, an art package which utilises the C64's hi-res mode to create monochrome or attribute-coloured pictures. Released last year, the packaging included a slip which mentioned the Advanced Art Studio - an upgrade which is now available.

The disk version loads the art program directly, but before the cassette version can be used, a back-up copy has to be made. The master program asks for details about your printer, allowing the user to configure the program correctly (the default being the Commodore MPS 801). The art program is saved onto a blank tape (provided by yourself) and is loaded in when you want to draw. The master program is left untouched, and is only used when a different configuration is required or if the copy becomes damaged.

The program's protection comes in the form of a typed input from the manual - failing to respond to the program's request causes it to crash.

The latest version of the Art Studio makes full use of the Commodore's capabilities to create full colour pictures in multi-colour mode. The utility is totally WIMP driven (no, this doesn't refer to the user) which means that a system of Windows/Icons/Menus and a Pointing device is used to manipulate the program.

The 'pointing device' refers to a small floating cursor which is used to access the features and is moved around via the Keyboard, Joystick, Koalapad or Mouse (Datex, AMX or GEOS - not NEOS). The cursor doubles as the brush, and while the two former methods are sufficient, only the latter options are considered to be of any real use.

The cursor tends to be a little too large and can become slightly annoying, especially when trying to do fine work in 'fill' and 'magnify' modes. A choice of cursors, or cursor redefine mode would have to be a useful feature to remedy this problem.

Drawing is carried out via Brush, Pen or Spray Can, with a variety of 'nibs' and spray formations available. The brush can be totally redefined to suit requirements, and may be used to draw many small items repeatedly - one tree soon becomes a forest.

A major problem often occurs when drawing a line 'freehand'. At any reasonable speed the line tends to break up, leaving it dotted and in need of touching up if a fill is intended. The only obvious way around this is to draw more slowly (very slowly in fact), or to use the continuous function which connects two defined points with a straight line. While being quite effective, this is rather limiting - and is practically useless for curves.

Other drawing functions include rays from a specified point, and the ability to draw squares and triangles by defining opposing corners. Circles are drawn in similar fashion, but sadly, the option to create ellipses is missing.

The main advantage of the Advanced Art Studio over its predecessor is the fact that it utilises the C64's multi-colour mode - a definite improvement over the attribute-ridden hi-res. Although it allows greater choice of colours, some care and a little thought must still be taken to avoid colour problems. The multi-colour screen supports a 160 x 200 or 32,000 pixel resolution, but is split into 1,000 8 x 4 pixel character squares or 'cells'. Each cell can hold up to four colours, one of which is the paper or background colour common to all cells.

Positioning of colour is therefore slightly affected and attribute problems can still occur. This becomes clearly evident when attempting to put different multi-coloured patterned fills next to each other - colours from one pattern tend to bleed into the other, and the edges become jagged and discoloured as the machine attempts to put more than four colours within a cell.

The fill mode is used to colour larger areas of the picture, and can be block (single colour) or pattern filled. Any area can be filled, but it must be bordered by an unbroken line, or the colour bleeds out through the gap. A series of patterns are available within the program, and patterns and their repeat size can also be defined to enable complex designs to be quickly and easily created.

A useful and technically impressive feature of the package is its comprehensive windowing system, which allows areas of the screen to be copied or moved around as desired. Once a window has been defined, the program supports the options to Cut and Paste (effectively copy to another part of the screen). Cut, Clear and Paste (move without copying); Rotate the segment through right angles; Flip it horizontally or vertically, and even Re-scale it to a different size. Any defined area can be saved to tape or disk, allowing a library of picture elements to be built up for later use.

Digital doodlers will be pleased to hear that the program also allows mistakes to be easily corrected using the 'undo' option - effectively cancelling the last command (Mark, Line, Fill and so on). After each entry, the previous screen is stored in memory so that if a command is entered wrongly or an unwanted change made, the previous screen is recalled to be re-worked. Unfortunately the 'undo' option cannot be initiated while the program carries out a command. A fill that has gone wrong cannot, therefore, be cancelled halfway through; you have to wait for the rather lengthy process to finish before 'undoing' it.

This option is also made ineffective whenever the main screen is replaced with one of the other, larger features such as the pattern edit or magnify mode (this is because the main display must be stored while a secondary screen is brought into play).

The magnify screen can be used to 'touch up' areas of the picture by, as the name suggests, blowing up the image to either two, four or eight times normal size. The screen can then be moved around in magnify mode, allowing the whole picture to be edited in this manner if necessary.

Text entries can also be added to pictures and a full font editor is included so that a new character set may be designed.

Both versions include a BASIC 'slideshow' program which allows pictures to be loaded onto the screen without having to load the whole art studio program.

Bearing in mind the limits of the C64, the Advanced Art Studio package attempts to be as complete as possible within the constraints of the machine. The inclusion of the Advanced Art Studio's predecessor makes the package tempting, but there are plenty of other art packages available including the superb Neos Mouse and Cheese.

The Art Studio has an extensive file-handling system, allowing full storage and retrieval of digitally conceived masterpieces. However, as with any system that uses lots of access, the cassette version is almost unusable. One flaw with the disk system is the ability to overwrite same name files by mistake. Instead of a 'file already exists - overwrite y/n?' prompt, the program just goes straight ahead and carries out the save operation.

If you wanted to load a picture onto the initial blank screen, clicking on 'save' instead of 'load' initiates the saving of the blank screen over the named picture file, effectively erasing it. This is quite easy to do as the load and save commands are right next to each other... I should know, I've done it!

Bearing in mind the limits of the C64, the Advanced Art Studio package attempts to be as complete as possible within the constraints of the machine, and contains many features previously unavailable on other systems. The inclusion of the Advanced Art Studio's predecessor makes the package tempting, but there are plenty of other art packages available including the superb Neos Mouse and Cheese. I do recommend this, but with an element of caution - shop around, think long and choose wisely.