How To Save Yourself From Children With ArtRage

I went to a primary school today (kidnapped by family) and was forced into close exposure with small children. I'm still traumatised. Luckily, ArtRage has amazingly hypnotic and soothing properties upon the savage child.

Oh, that's pretty much what I was there for. To promote ArtRage to people and show them how to use it (fairly casually and unofficially).

They had the free version (though they're planning to buy a licensed version soon), but the kids didn't care. Well, not yet. It went something like this...

A small group of children are culled from the herd and manoeuvred into my presence. "here", they are told, "this nice person will teach you about ArtRage!" and the supervisor flees, leaving me to be eyeballed by these... these preteens.


I point out where to open ArtRage. They measure the distance to the door and comply. I tell them to choose the paintbrush. They begrudgingly do. I tell them to pick a colour. They eye me with scorn but, having committed this far, do so. I get them to click it on the canvas, and lo! paint appears!


Interest dawns, slightly, but it barely distracts them from their fellow packmembers. I make them pick another colour - they eye me, they've already done this. But why not make a duotone splatter? And then I tell them to paint over the first colour.


And it mixes. And the ArtRapture strikes. And they stare, glassy eyed, trapped, hand moving steadily as they add and mix and stir and play with the colours. So many colours...




Eventually some of them progressed to drawings - one kid drew a volcano and I told him to put a person in, on fire. So he happily did, along with some stick figures running away. When they discovered the ruler stencil, they all ended up rotating it endlessly and laughing. And then they got kicked off, and new kids had a turn.

ArtRage is so awesome.

Here's a list of my ArtRage tutorials and stuff. (some are old, so not so tidy. ArtRage tutorials were some of the first things I tried to write for online).
ArtRage Painting - the real paint of digital art
ArtRage 3 - Digital Painting With Watercolours!
ArtRage versus Photoshop
How to Register ArtRage
ArtRage Tutorials and Resources
ArtRage Studio and Studio Pro Tutorials
ArtRage Stickers
Graphics Tablets and ArtRage
The Best ArtRage Videos


The official ArtRage website is at http://www.artrage.com/ and the artist-run online magazine is ArtRageUs