ART NOUVEAU

Reviewed by Mike Williams

A good many art and painting packages have appeared for the Archimedes since it was launched, not least ProArtisan from Clares Micro Supplies, reviewed in Volume 2 Issue 3. Readers may well be forgiven for wondering if there is room for another (and there are more to come).

Art Nouveau is clearly a quality product; even a brief familiarisation with the package will readily convince anyone of the amount of thought and development which has gone into this package. For your £42.50 you get a disc and a manual of some 100 pages or so. The software works in mode 15 (256 colours), though there is an option to load mode 12 screens and convert them to mode 15.

For this review, Art Nouveau was used on an Archimedes 310 with RISC OS installed, and no problems were encountered with this combination. However, the software cannot be run directly from the Desktop, though this may well be provided for in production versions. At present, Art Nouveau starts by saving the current configuration of your machine which is then reconfigured. There appears to be no way of avoiding this, even if the machine has already been put through this process, and I do not feel totally happy with this approach.

Once loaded, Art Nouveau presents a totally black screen, apart from a white border. To make any use of the software it is essential to refer to the manual, so it is fortunate that this is well written. It appears to be a fact of life with the Archimedes that every software house adopts a different strategy for the use of pop-up menus and mouse control, and Art Nouveau is no exception, though it is logical and probably follows Acorn's suggested standards more than most.

Pressing the menu (middle) button at any time displays a menu bar across the top of the screen (with eight menu options), and a status display at its foot. Release the menu button and the menu bar immediately disappears. Even after several hours spent using this software, I still found this disconcerting. Moving the mouse pointer to any option on the menu bar triggers a pull-down menu, and many of the menu options either link through to further sub-menus, or call up a new screen for some major options. The menus are very stylish in appearance, and the whole system adopts a consistent approach.

LINE DRAWING

Two of the main menus provide for the drawing of straight or curved lines and shapes, with a choice of outline or filled shapes. Straight line drawing includes single and continuous rubber-band drawing, plus squares, rectangles, parallelograms and triangles. User defined polygons can be created, and the result positioned, scaled and rotated as required.

Curve drawing includes ellipses, circles, arcs, segments and sectors, and also a free-flowing curve joining two points. This is much like the Bezier curves used in some other software, but bends in one direction only ('C' not 'S' shaped). In practice it is simple to use, and a succession of such curves may be easily and smoothly joined together.

PENCILS AND BRUSHES

Freehand drawing uses the pencil option in the goodies menu. This can be used in one of two ways. In one case it leaves a trail of dots, and the extent to which this appears as a continuous line depends upon the speed with which drawing takes place. The other format always creates a continuous line irrespective of drawing speed. The mouse can also be locked so that lines can be accurately drawn vertically and horizontally.

Line drawing can also use a so-called colour cycle, in which the sequence of dots forming a line follows a pre-determined sequence of colours. Several such sequences are supplied on the Art Nouveau disc and may be loaded and selected as required. Alternatively the user may design his own colour cycles, and in turn save these to disc.

You can also select a spray brush, and control the shape and size of the 'droplets', as well as the size of the spray area. It is also worth saying here that Art Nouveau provides a colour merge option. This mixes the pixels within a small square box displayed on screen when the action (left-hand) mouse button is pressed. This needs to be used with care, as the results are not that subtle, and on the whole I would rate this less highly than ProArtisan's wash facility.

Quite different to either of the above is a brush facility. This 'loads' a brush with a rectangular image or pattern with which to paint on the screen. The size of a brush is not restricted other than by the size of the screen itself. A number of brushes are supplied as part of the Art Nouveau disc. Once a brush is selected, pressing the action button will place the brush image on the screen. The brush can also be used like a spray brush to leave a continuous trail of images.

Once a brush has been selected, its size can be halved or doubled, independently in the x and y directions, or stretched (and that means reduced as well) to any size required. However, the resulting image seems often coarser and less attractive than one generated at the required size initially.

Some beautiful effects can also be achieved by applying any of several distortions to a brush image, and there is an option to disort a brush onto any enclosed area. Any of the colours in a brush can also be made transparent so that the existing background shows through in these areas. This is very useful for creating a brush which appears not to have a rectangular shape but that of some intricate object.

Finally, the user can create and save his own design of brush. This can be done by picking up any rectangular area of the current screen display, or (in order to preserve the current screen image), by switching to a separate scratch screen which can be used independently of the main drawing area. Any brush generated can then be saved to disc for future use.

PIXELS, FONTS AND PATTERNS

Art Nouveau is an entirely pixel oriented package, and nowhere does this show more clearly than in the Pixel Editor. This is an excellent example of its kind, allowing the image to be enlarged 2, 4, 8, or 16 times for detailed editing of pixels.

Art Nouveau also allows text to be incorporated on a screen design, using the stndard Acorn font or an alternative supplied with Art Nouveau. There is also a font editor allowing the user to design and save his own fonts.

Various patterns are supplied both as default and with others on disc. Any colour or pattern can be selected for the flood-fill operation, and the screen can also be cleared to a pattern as well as a colour. A pattern editor can be used to generate new designs, which can then be saved to disc, and it is also possible to select the current brush as a pattern.

HOUSEKEEPING FUNCTIONS

Disc management seems excellent. The disc menu has the expected save and load functions, covering screens, brushes, and patterns, but will also format and initialise a new disc, and caters well for disc changes while using Art Nouveau. There is also an option to delete files, which can be very handy at times.

Two print options are provided, one for Epson FX compatibles with the facility to adjust the tonal range, and a colour dump which I tried with an Integrex Colourjet 132. The results of this seemed very washed out compared with the richness of the screen image, and colour prints from ProArtisan are better, though I have yet to see a reasonably priced colour printer which will achieve really good rendering of a 256 colour mode.

MANUAL

I have already referred to this. Nearly three-quarters of its contents are tutorial in style, and well written in a way which really does take you step by step through virtually all the facilities available. The remainder acts as a reference guide to the menu options. The quality of the illustrations was poor, but my copy was a draft version only. Having ploughed my way right through the tutorial section I was left feeling a little confused, and not clear about which menu provided which facility. If this is so, then it may derive more from the design of the menu system rather than from any inadequacies in the manual itself. Any criticsm here can also be taken as a compliment as it reflects the very richness of the Art Nouveau environment.

CONCLUSIONS

As indicated earlier, my copy of Art Nouveau was not a final version. However, it is certainly impressive, and deserves to sell well. It will take anyone some time to get used to the menu system, but this is true of many packages. Once past that hurdle, Art Nouveau will prove a powerful and versatile addition to the range of art packages for the Archimedes, and is a good first product by a new company, and at a highly competitive and attractive price.
ProductArt Nouveau
SupplierComputer Assisted Learning Ltd
 Strathclyde Business Centre,
 New Stevenston,
 Strathclyde, Scotland ML1 4JB.
 Tel. (0698) 733775
Price:£42.50 inc.