The internet is a good place to develop your expertise in creating drawings, as well as manipulating photographs by applying special effects, shades, changing colours and other editing activities.

Painting and drawing is one of the first creative activities children indulge in right from the kindergarten years. The passion often continues beyond that, largely helped by formal classes where individual talents come out on paper.

 
With the advent of computers, now children have a new outlet for their creativity and can indulge in drawing online. And not only can they develop their expertise in creating drawings, but also manipulating photographs by applying special effects, shades, changing colours and other editing activities. Today we will take a look at few online tools that offer paint/photo editing for free.

Sumo Paint

http//www.sumopaint.com
With a very intuitive interface that's both attractive to look at and user-friendly at the same time, Sumo Paint boasts a humour line on its front page, “Release your inner artist and put Pablo Picasso to shame with the finest painter software online!”

Start off with registration using the top right by entering a desired username, password and email address (and read terms and conditions and check the box that you have done so) and press 'Register' button. Wait for a while as a notification appears saying you can now login. Enter the username and password, and press the 'Images' tab at the upper part of the screen. Here, one can browse images created by others or upload new ones. Since there's no way to start with a blank image, uploading an empty image and using Sumo tools to draw online can be a good idea. To get a jump start, select an existing one from a number of images displayed, and click 'Open in Sumo Paint' button. This results in a separate browser window opening up, so make sure pop-ups are allowed at least for Sumo Paint.

The real fun starts in the full screen window where tools are laid out on the left, and selecting each reveals more options at the top, such as brush width. And there are some fresh tools such as symmetry creation (ideal for creating fractals), stars and shape creation tools that automatically change shapes to create many news ones by simply dragging the mouse in drawing board area. While colour pickers are on the right, advanced options such as transparency control give nearly all the controls one needs while creating drawings.

Other tools

PicNik (www.picnik.com) requires no registration — simply click 'Get Started Now!' button to begin. The site offers standard options of crop, resize, photo-fixing, etc, and requires Flash plug-in to run in the browser. Flash plug-in is either already installed on your PC or can be done with the link that appears (if it is not installed).

Another Flash based paint tool is SplashUp (www.splashup.com) that comes in a light version for download, or an online version for power users. This tool allows editing of images already present at social networking sites such as Flickr, Facebook and Picasa.

Other simple tools include LunaPic (www.lunapic.com) which is a bit slow to respond on tool selection and is almost a replica of the basic paint tool found in most operating systems.

Then there's PixlR (www.pixlr.com) where one can start with a new drawing, giving it a name and pressing 'OK' button with default height and width dimensions. Snipshot (www.snipshot.com) is a tool that allows users to try by a trial link while FotoFlexer (http//fotoflexer.com) is yet another simple photo editor.

Online image editing can be a fun way to learn tips-n-tricks of image editing, and can be combined with some practice over offline tools such as Photoshop for better practice.

But the real joy of easy sharing creative content lies in online photo editing tools!