Welcome to Mouse and Mom Reviews, where my nine year old daughter and I each provide our perspectives on a product or service. If you have any questions for either Mouse or me, feel free to leave a comment and one of us will respond.

Mouse says…

Creativity Express is an art computer game. It teaches you about art in a cool way. Furnace, Tickles and Ruby are your art guides and are the characters that teach you about art. They are really funny. Tickles has inventions that don’t work, like her time machine. Furnace makes paint and Tickles eats it. Ruby does most of the teaching.

My favorite part is when they let you make paint. I learned that grape skins will react with copper and then it forms a green crust. If you grind it, it will turn into a fine green powder. If you mix that with egg yolk, it will make a tempera paint. If you mix it with oil, it will turn into an oil paint. This paint may turn black if mixed with other colors.

I think this art program is very good for elementary aged children.

Mom says…

When madcaplogic contacted me to see if I would be interested in accepting a copy of Creativity Express, I was both excited and apprehensive. From the trailer, it looked like everything my children enjoy in computer games: interactive, colorful, interesting characters and lots to do with the newfound information. And it teaches about art, one of my daughter’s favorite subjects. Her eyes lit up after watching the trailer and I knew that I would be doing a review one way or another.

On the other hand, it looked to me like yet another addition to the growing trend of “edutainment” which left me less than enthusiastic. In its introduction, the program differentiates itself from other art programs:

Most textbooks teach art as 14 elements and principles. Let’s look at it a different way…

It reminded me of Veggie Tales, which is fine for Saturday morning, but I imagined the same treatment of art subjects: fun, but lacking of any real substance.

When we received the software, however, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, the art guides are cartoon characters, but they do carry the student through the fourteen elements and principles in an engaging and informative way. The program teaches art as a “language,” with each component a valuable tool in expressing an idea. Each segment presents a small lesson about some aspect of art, teaching through the example of historic artists and their works. Children are encouraged to take a close look at the art work, both in its parts and as a whole. Then they have an opportunity to try out the techniques they have learned or quiz themselves on the knowledge they have gained.

My daughter has been instructing me on the use of value, enjoying her broadened vocabulary and ability to practice using it with her own art set. While mixing tempera paints for our lesson on Georges Seurat and pointilism, she narrated the process of making these same colors the “old-fashioned way.”

Two points:

1. In the introduction, two types of artists are discussed. The kind who plans everything beforehand, and the kind who “explores” the art, seeing what it turns into as he creates. Preferential treatment seems to be given to the latter.

2. While Furnace is making paint, Tickles tastes it. Discovering it is paint, she spits it out all over Furnace. When he moves his paws and spoons out of the way, the green paint makes a bikini outline for an instant. The scene is included in the trailer if you have concerns.

Overall, the software does a nice job accomplishing what it sets out to do. My daughter is standing here impatiently, hoping to work on it some more once this entry is published. My four year old has already scooted a chair up to watch. Both of them are more familiar with basic art principles and are beginning to recognize their usage when they see them in real works of art.

If you have used this software and have any comments, please feel free to leave your thoughts or link to your own review on your blog!

Disclosure: This product, which retails at $29.95, was received in exchange for this review. While we certainly appreciate the company’s generosity, we feel we have given an honest assessment of the product in the interest of helping readers determine whether they would be interested in purchasing it.