Introduction

While nothing can replace the pleasure of real paint and the experience of working with actual materials, Albert's Paintbox does provide learning opportunities which are hard to replicate without ICT. Phrases such as 'explore ideas' and 'adapt and improve' are frequently used in the English National Curriculum and similar documents from parallel authorities in other countries.

Albert's Paintbox provides an environment within which exploring, adapting and improving are intrinsic to the activities. Unlike most other media, ICT allows an infinite number of tries, encourages the question 'what if . . . ?' and does not complain when more paper is used or paint is spilled. And don't forget that teachers, too, can learn from play.

Albert's Paintbox is also a very useful program to introduce general ICT concepts in a pupil-friendly way. Pop-up menus, font selection, undo and redo will be standard features of many other programs, as will techniques such as load and save, copy and paste, cut and paste . . .

Teaching ideas are provided throughout this manual. They are the tip of the iceberg: we find that teachers and children use our software in more creative ways than we can possibly imagine.

Teacher shortcuts

To leave the program, press ESCAPE or click the arrow at the lower left corner of the screen. ESCAPE will also take you from the activity back to the title screen.

The program opens on the Main Menu screen. The six buttons at the bottom of the screen open six editable Configurations that we suggest – from left to right – are a phased introduction to the tools and techniques. If you are using Albert's Paintbox for the first time, you can probably see only five. Press CONTROL + F2 to open the Configurations editor and you can change the Configurations to suit your pupils.

This shows the Configurations editor and the configuration for the Snail (it's the selected tab). The cross shows that it is turned off; just click it once to select it and once to turn it on. Anything on display in this window can be turned on or off just by clicking. For example, all the tools in the Painting Toolbox are on display. Click on any tool to turn it off. Click on the round Painting Toolbox icon to turn off all the painting tools. Click the OK tick in the bottom right-hand corner to save all changes and return to the Main Menu.

Languages

This program is in our Talk·2·Talk range which gives the user exposure to two languages in parallel. This option only appears if one or more additional languages have been installed; teachers have the option of using any two. Contact Resource Education or your usual supplier for details of the languages hat are available.

If you have purchased additional languages, put the Albert’s Paintbox Languages CD in the drive and press CONTROL + F3 from the main menu screen and follow the on-screen instructions.

When the installation is finished, open the Configuration editor (CONTROL + F2) to see the additional features shown at the bottom of the panel.

Title screen language

This sets the language that the program starts in. You can choose from any installed language.

First language

In each of the six Configurations, you can choose which language will be presented to the user as the First language. Any text on the screen and all recorded speech is then in this language.

Second language

There is an optional Second language which will repeat any spoken phrases in another tongue, rather like a simultaneous translation.

Any spoken words will be heard initially in the First language, followed by the same expression in the Second language.

Choose None for single-language use.

The Workspace

Clicking any of the Configuration buttons on the Main Menu takes you into the Workspace with the Canvas and Tools areas.

There are five Toolboxes in the workspace. Click the large round button at the lower left of the screen to pop up the Toolbox menu. The tools in the chosen Toolbox are displayed at the bottom of the screen. A red triangle above a tool shows there is a popup menu giving further choices.

Painting	Stamp	Text	File or Print	Picture

Down the right-hand side of the screen are tools which are likely to be used more frequently and are always available.

The Undo, Redo and Bin.
The facilities for choosing and changing Colours and Patterns
There are also Additional features – speech, sound, hints and so forth.

Other things

Generally, green buttons are selectable items: Paint, Stamp, Print. Blue buttons control more indirect events like Load, Save, Flip.

Common to the Paintbox, Stamp and Text Toolboxes are the Sizer tools. The Slider will appear above the button, but can be dragged anywhere on the screen. Drag the handle up or down to change the size of the brush, stamp or text, or click on the + and – to fine tune the size of a selection.

Painting Toolbox

The Painting setups are designed to read from left to right: type of tool, colour mode, painting action, tool size and whether the actions are constrained.

Brushes

There are three basic brushes: Round tip brush, Square tip brush and Slanted tip brush.

Unlike other graphics programs, the brush stays upright no matter what you draw. This is no problem with the Round Tip Brush and the Slanted Tip Brush will draw a perfectly featured oblique ellipse as drawn with an italic nib. You might consider an ellipse drawn with a Square Tip Brush to be unusual, but it is perfectly logical.

There are some things that can't be done with some tools. For example, you can't draw a shape with the Spray or Fill tools, so these items aren't shown.

All Brush tools can be used with Colours or Patterns.

Fudges

There are two tools which affect paint already on the Canvas:

Paint

There are three paint modes. Each can use solid colour or patterns:

The density of colour can be built up in layers of Thin paint and Rough paint.

Actions

The painting actions are:

Magic

The Magic button is available for some tools and is either on or off. When on:

In the classroom

Stamp Toolbox

Stamps are the Albert's Paintbox clip art. We supply a lot and you can also make your own. An umbrella represents the active stamp – it doesn't mean all your stamps will be umbrellas.

Acquiring stamps

Snap a stamp

This is a simplified 'copy and paste' routine: the mouse is used to select an area which can then be used as a stamp. The selected area remains highlighted with a marquee and is made into a stamp. It is also copied to the clipboard so you can switch to another program and paste your selected area directly (useful if you've snapped the whole Canvas).

Snip a stamp

This works in the same way as Snap a stamp, but is 'cut and paste': the selected area can be moved, leaving a white rectangle.

Use the stamp

Click in the Canvas area to start using a stamp and there will be a ticking noise while the stamp is live. The stamp remains live until you click somewhere else on the Canvas, press enter, or choose another Toolbox. It then becomes fixed. If you press escape before fixing, the stamp on the Canvas is cancelled, although it is still saved in memory. A stamp that has been Snipped, Snapped or Loaded is always available, even if you've moved to a different Toolbox and back: a thumbnail view is shown to the right of the Stamp tools. If a stamp has not been Snipped, Snapped or Loaded, the Use the stamp button is greyed out.

• If Use the stamp is inactive, the entire menu is not shown.

Stamp backgrounds

Stamps are small pictures within a rectangular frame. Much of the time, the items you wish to use on a stamp aren't shaped like a simple rectangle. When our artist draws an item, he fills the background with a colour that he hasn't used in the picture. If you've selected Background off, Albert's Paintbox takes the colour found at the bottom left-hand corner and makes it invisible. This can have unexpected consequences. If you Snap or Snip a stamp from your picture and have the Background off, your stamp can develop holes because the colour in the bottom left-hand corner is repeated elsewhere in the stamp. To fix this, you need to change the colour of this spot – the Zoom in tool (Picture toolbox) is useful for getting in close to change just one pixel with the Freehand paintbrush.

Alternatively, you could choose Background on and use the whole of the stamp.

Stamps are Background off by default if you deactivate both buttons.

Thin stamps have no backgrounds and behave like Thin paint: the picture shows through when you use them. This can be effective when building layers of stamps or paint.

Load or Save Stamps

The Load a Stamp button takes you into the Stamps browser. To protect your system and to avoid confusion, users can't browse outside the stamps folders.

The first item is the Clipboard, provided it holds a graphic. Any graphic item on the Clipboard created in another program can be used as a stamp. Remember that any stamp that is Snapped, Snipped or Loaded will also be copied to the Clipboard, replacing anything already there.

Albert’s Paintbox is supplied with a number of stamps. If you wish to use clip art from any other source – Sherston, Clicker, symbol files and so on – you must copy the pictures into the proper place. Open the Configurations Editor (CONTROL + F2) and click Stamps folder. This will open the Stamps folder and any pictures you wish to use can be copied into a folder in this area.

Stamps created by users are also visible in this browser although they are stored in the logged-on user’s directory:

My Documents\Alberts Paintbox\My Stamps

Stamps can’t be saved in any other area. They are saved here when you click Save the Stamp and are numbered automatically although the numbers are not used by the program. When a stamp is saved, a short animation is shown to show the process has occurred.

To view the stamps from the Desktop, navigate to this folder; if you’re using XP or above, set the View to Thumbnails. Unwanted stamps can be deleted in the usual way. Multiple users with the same logon details will all have their stamps saved in this folder.

Flip and Turn

It's bad enough that 99% of clip art isn't suitable, but when you do find something that will do it's often facing the wrong way. These utilities are designed to help. When there is an active stamp on the Canvas, you can Turn it clockwise in steps of 90 degrees, Flip left to right or Flip top to bottom. In combination, this gives 8 orientations for each stamp.

Repeats

You may have noticed that the background on the Main Menu changes each time you go to it. Every time this screen is created, the program chooses a stamp at random from the Front Tiles folder in the Stamps area and tiles it to make a repeat pattern. If you press F8 you can cycle through all the designs, and you can load these stamps for your own use from the Front tiles folder.

While the Main Menu design repeats a tile in a single orientation, the repeat patterns in the program are arranged in groups of four images.

In the classroom

Text Toolbox

Clicking on the Canvas creates a new text block that behaves in the same way as a Stamp: the text block is live until you decide to fix it by pressing enter or selecting another toolbox, or pressing escape to cancel. The text block reflects text that is typed into a box at the bottom of the screen – the cursor must be in this area or new type won't be shown.

While the text block is live you can change any aspect.

Paint

There are three font painting modes, identical to those found in the Paint Toolbox. Each can use solid colour or patterns:

Fonts

Click this icon to open the list of installed fonts.

In the classroom

File or Print Toolbox

Loading or Saving opens a browser to the user's My Documents\Alberts Paintbox folder. You can browse to any other folder within My Documents, so users with a common login can each have their own folder. Files cannot be saved in any location outside My Documents or saved anywhere else.

Load a picture

Pictures can be in any graphic format recognised by Windows. If you wish to load any picture into Albert's Paintbox, it must be somewhere in the My Documents folder. Remember that photographs can be quite large. As with any graphics software, the bigger the picture, the slower the program will perform.

Canvas size

When Albert's Paintbox is opened, the default Canvas area is 650 pixels by 480 pixels, which is in the same proportions as your monitor (4:3). When you print from Albert's Paintbox, the Canvas is stretched or squeezed proportionally to fit the print layout you have chosen. If you open an existing file, the Canvas will take on the size of the picture and adjust the view to fit.

You can specify the size of the canvas used in each Configuration in the Configurations editor. Choose a size from the Canvas drop-down menu.

Teachers can create, edit or delete blank canvases by selecting Edit, found at the bottom of the list. This pops up a small window with the canvas editing functions. Any canvas that you create here will be available in the other Configurations, but will not replace the selected size. Naturally, if you delete a Canvas, it’s removed from all Configurations.

Save the picture

New pictures are saved in .BMP format by default. Pictures that have been loaded are automatically resaved in the format in which they were loaded, with the exception of .WMF files which are converted into a bitmap format. It is possible to save pictures in other formats. Click in the filename area at the top of the browsers and press the menu key. This will show a number of filetype options.

Unlike most software, Albert's Paintbox never remembers filenames, just in case an important file gets overwritten accidentally. The only place files can be saved is in the My Documents folder.

Print the picture

This opens a dialog box giving the user the opportunity to click one of nine icons showing different locations on a page.

Click the Turn page icon to change the page from landscape to portrait and back. The picture will be scaled proportionally to fit the location chosen. With a little ingenuity, it's possible to print four pictures on one page.

In the classroom

Picture Toolbox

No matter how large the picture that's loaded, Albert's Paintbox always gives the picture best fit in the Canvas area. Even if you're not in the Picture Toolbox, it's always possible to zoom in and out of a picture by holding down the shift key and scrolling with the mouse wheel. You can also hold down the shift key and drag the picture round with the mouse when zoomed in.

For younger children – and for those who don't have a mouse wheel – the Zoom in and Zoom out buttons perform the same task. When you are zoomed in as far as you can go with the smallest Brush you can make, it's possible to edit individual pixels.

Zoomed in pictures can be dragged around with the mouse when you are in the Picture Toolbox.

Flip and Turn

Sometime pictures look better when they're facing the other way. There's that story of the piece of modern abstract painting that was displayed in the Tate Gallery upside down for six years before anyone noticed.

These buttons work on the whole picture to let you Turn it clockwise in steps of 90 degrees, Flip left to right or Flip top to bottom.

Symmetry

All Painting (except Fill), Text and Stamp tools work with symmetry turned on: Horizontal mirror, Vertical mirror and Vertical and horizontal mirrors. Click No symmetry to turn symmetries off.

The lines of symmetry are applied to the entire Canvas, even when zoomed into an area where the lines are not visible.

In the classroom

Colours and Patterns

Colour/Pattern pots are hexagonal. Above them are the Colour picker, the Colour/Pattern maker, the Use colours button and the Use patterns button. The current colour or pattern is highlighted with a white frame. The Colours/Patterns can't be turned off in the Configurations editor, but you can choose to use only Paint or Patterns or both.

Use Colours, Use Patterns

The colour pots show either colours or patterns. Click these buttons to switch between the two.

Colour Picker

The Colour Picker can be used to copy any colour in the picture. Picked colours replace the colour in the highlighted Colour pot.

Colour/Pattern maker

This tool changes function to match the current colour/pattern mode.

Colour maker

There are two further means of changing the highlighted colour. The default is a simple colour picker:

At the top of the panel is a rainbow selection of colours and grey. In the centre of the panel is a hexagon showing the Old colour and beneath that another hexagon showing the New colour that will replace the highlighted colour when you click the OK tick button. To the left and right of this hexagon are four darker and four lighter shades of this colour. Click any hexagon to choose a new colour, or click the Cancel cross to keep the old colour.

If you have selected Advanced colour mixer in the Configurations editor, you can actively create colours rather than passively picking.

Colour mixing in Albert's Paintbox is based on the additive colour system (the mixing of light) used by televisions and monitors, rather than subtractive colours (the mixing of pigments) used when painting or printing. All the 16 million colours that computer systems can show can be created (even if human eyes can't tell the difference between a lot of them) and they are all made from different mixes of red, green and blue (RGB).

The Advanced colour mixer is easier to use than it looks: it needs to be played with to get the best out of it. Seven clickable base colours are offered as starting points: the red, green, blue primary colours; the cyan, yellow, magenta secondary colours; and grey. The Old colour is shown in a hexagon beneath these, and the New colour hexagon is underneath that. In the left-hand side of the dialog box are the Red slider, the Green slider, the Blue slider (RGB) and the Brightness slider. When the red, green and blue sliders are at their maximum, you make white, and black when they are at minimum. Each slider also shows a gradient of all the possible colours that can be made by adjusting that slider while the other two remain fixed; each pointer indicates the same colour. Pick the colour you want from one of the gradient bars by clicking on it or by moving that slider to point to it.

All 16,777,216 colours can be made using the RGB sliders, but it is difficult making a colour lighter or darker as it involves adjusting more than one slider. To make things easier, the Brightness slider can be used to adjust the tint of the colour defined by the RGB sliders. Moving the Brightness slider will, of course, adjust the RGB sliders.

Do not be tempted to describe the Brightness slider as 'Adding white' when lightening a colour. The Brightness slider is just a convenient way of simultaneously adding or subtracting RGB values.

Pattern Maker

All the patterns are based on an 8 x 8 grid and an enlarged version is shown in the box. The colours are on the left, repeated from the Workspace. The selected colour can be replaced with any colour in the grid by using the Colour picker. This is a temporary change and you will not alter the corresponding colour in the Workspace.

Pick a colour and click in a square on the grid. The Old pattern is in the hexagon on the left and your changes are shown on the right. You have up to twenty Undo steps, but if that isn't enough, click the cross to Cancel.

Resetting Colours and Patterns

Colours and patterns are edited at user level: all changes apply for all Configurations, but only for the logged-on user. Edited colours and patterns are stored in:

My Documents\Albert's Paintbox\Resources\_Palette. 

In this folder, patterns are numbered from 0 to 15, colours are stored in files numbered 16 to 31.

In the classroom

Undo, Redo and Bin

Up to 10 Redo steps can be set for each Configuration.

The Bin clears the workspace, but a picture can be retrieved by clicking Undo.

Additional features

Some features of Albert's Paintbox are not controlled from the Workspace but are set in the Configurations editor. Generally, these items are on or off.

Sound effects

Most tools have their own sound effects when they are used, ideal for children who need some feedback or a cause-and-effect environment. But even the child isolated from the rest of the world with headphones can find them tiresome.

Rollover text hints

With this set on, the name of the button is put on the screen after a short delay. Font, size and weight can be adjusted in the file:

Alberts Paintbox\Resources\Language\English\Font.txt

If you change the font, you may need to experiment with the supporting numbers to get a good result.

Rollover speech hints

With this set on, the name of the button is spoken after a short delay.

Don't fill black

For children with poor motor control who are practising filling in area with colour, accidentally filling the outline can have devastating consequences. With this facility on, black cannot be changed.

Advanced colour mixer

The Advanced colour mixer is the means of changing colour when this is set to be on. When off, the simple colour picker is used.

Scrollbars

With this feature on, standard scrollbars can be used to control the Canvas view when zoomed in.

It's always possible to zoom in and out of a picture by holding down the shift key and scrolling with the mouse wheel. You can also hold down the shift key and drag the picture round with the mouse when zoomed in.

Undo

You can set up to 10 levels of Undo.