What is Easy Color Paint?

Easy Color Paint is exactly what it claims to be: an inexpensive 8-bit (256 color) painting program that operates with the simplicity of our old friend MacPaint. Although Easy Color Paint lacks some of the high-end features (and the price tag) of programs such as Studio/8, it has enough little tricks — such as user-editable colors and patterns, coloring modes (how one color applied over another affects the blend), color printing on the ImageWriter and color QuickDraw printers, support for the WACOM line of pressure-sensitive tablets, and gradient fills — to bring out the digital Degas in all of us.

You can configure Easy Color Paint to suit your artistic capabilities. Children can double-click on the Junior Preference file to bring up a 16-color palette with locked windows, Or you might slap on a beret and try Artist, where a11 256 colors are displayed at once and you can access a limited variety of special effects. You can customize your favorite options and save them in their own Preference file.

Creative Software's program is more than a colorized version of MacPaint. Yes, you’ll feel right at home with the MacPaint-like tools, but a closer look at Easy Color Paint reveals some special enhancements. Most tools produce their own menus when you select them. The Lasso menu, for example, supplies blend options for selected regions as well as a choice betweentight lasso and a loose one. To match colors, you can hold down Shift-Option to reveal an eyedropper tool. The space-conscious can remove the title bar and invoke Skinny Tools, a slender tool palette that fits neatly along the left side of your screen. You can also remove scroll bars to gain even more painting area (simply Shift-Option-drag at the corner and sides to move window boundaries).

Easy Color Paint comes with a few minor annoyances. When you're working in Fatbits, you can use only the pencil tool. Also, the painting size is determined when you launch the application, which causes any painting larger than the size you initially set to be cut off (you select where) and the cropped portions to become inaccessible. To view and edit the larger painting, you must quit, relaunch, and specify new dimensions for the painting window.

In a more expensive program, these complaints would be more than minor, but let's face it: Easy Color Paint is cheap, cheap, cheap. And not only that — it's also fast, reliable, and fun to use. If you need a bargain-priced set of electronic crayons around the home or office. Easy Color Paint is hard to beat.

Breen, Christopher. (November 1991). Easy Color Paint. MacUser. (pgs. 91-92).

Download Easy Color Paint for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II