ColorMixer

Teaching children how to paint with actual paints can be a potentially messy business, so having a digital way to show them how the primary colors mix together can be useful. Color Mixer is a line art coloring program that doesn't let users select colors from a color palette, instead they have to mix them from the three primary colors.

The application is clearly designed for children and features particularly bright and colorful, oversized buttons, with the use of recognizable images where possible. The approach works and everything is almost instantly identifiable, children will have no difficulty figuring out what button is what. The application even includes specially designed help documentation that even a child could decipher.

Given how the paint mixing option is a big part of the application, it is relatively easy to use. Children click on one primary color first which fills the bowl, then they can add others. The application displays the amount of the three colors being used via bars that fill with the corresponding color. Taking away color is the only difficult part, which is done by adding the white, perhaps to teach children that you can't subtract color with paint.

There are no shortage of tools and features inside the application to paint with. More impressively though, it comes with over 50 examples of line art included in the application, for children to draw and color with. Other pictures could easily be downloaded or added from the internet, giving the application a long life and plenty of reusability.

Color Mixer provides all the standard painting tools that users should be familiar with, paint brushes, a pointer, a way to mass fill areas and an eraser. One tool it doesn't include is the color picker to quickly grab a previously used color, however, this choice seems deliberate to try and encourage children to learn how to mix specific colors.

Color Mixer offers an interesting selection of tools and options, yet it is clearly built around the mixing paint concept. The gimmick works though and actually provides a fun twist on a very simple concept, breathing new life into a standard painting application. Color Mixer is a very entertaining and worthwhile application.