Kim Pounder is a remarkable artist when equipped with pen and paper, as those who know her may be aware. Those who aren’t, I’d advise visit her gallery some time. You’ll note a handful of coloured works in there, amongst the sketches and black and white art: this is attributed by her to a lack of software (for the purposes of colouring and shading).

Kim isn’t Linus Torvalds. She’s moderately computer literate, but not any more so than most. If nothing else, I thought it would be a great usability experiment to suggest she use The GIMP for editing and colouring her artwork digitally, instead of recommending the typically accepted software, Photoshop or Illustrator. Essentially, financial reasons meant that neither application was a viable option for her, and I wasn’t about to advocate piracy.

At this point, I recommended The GIMP to her, and offered download links… which, for whatever reason, weren’t working for her. So I downloaded The GIMP and GTK+ packages for Windows, burnt them to CD (haha, no, I didn’t bother with including the program source code! Kim, you’re most welcome to the source code if you desire it — there, GNU compliance!), and physically gave it to her. A few days later, not only has the application been installed and configured (those of you who have installed The GIMP recently may recall a screen DPI calibration utility which must be negotiated), she’d also managed to use the tool to colour, using an airbrush, the “Woodland Fae” illustration.

Take that, those who condemn the usability of Open-Source applications! I’ll admit it’s not up to the same interface standards as those of Adobe, but then this project doesn’t (to the best of my knowledge) have any full-time sponsored employees working on it, either. Oh, yeah, and it’s free.

The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

The GIMP for Windows may be downloaded from http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/ free of charge. Unix binaries and source code archives are available directly from the official website of The Gimp, http://www.gimp.org/.