Kid Pix Tips and Tricks

Kid Pix Drawing and Stamp Tricks 

To Create Various Sizes of Stamps for your Drawings and Slide Shows 

1. To double the size of your stamp 

bullet Macintosh: Hold down the Option key while you stamp 
bullet DOS/Windows: Hold down the Ctrl key while you stamp 

2. To triple the size of your stamp 

bullet Macintosh: Hold down the Shift key while you stamp 
bullet DOS/Windows: Hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys 

3. To quadruple the size of your stamp 

bullet Macintosh: Hold down the both the Shift key and Option key 

To Edit & Restore Stamps 

bullet Kid Pix Studio: Select the Stamp tool, then select a stamp to add to your picture. Double-click the stamp and the Stamp Editor dialog box will appear. Students can change the colors and shapes of the stamps. Note: These changes will remain until you follow the
steps below. To go back to the original, select the Restore Original button in the same Stamp Editor dialog box.
bulletKid Pix 2: Select the Stamp tool, then click on a stamp and add to your picture. From the Goodies menu, select Edit Stamp. Students can change colors and create their own stamps. Note: These changes will remain until you follow the steps below. To go back to the original, select the Restore Original button in the same Stamp Editor dialog box. 

To Create Perfect Circles and Squares 

  1. To draw a perfect circle, hold down the Shift key when you select the Oval tool. 
  2. To draw a perfect square, hold down the Shift key when you select the Box tool. 

To Create a "Coloring Book" Outline Effect 

  1. Select the Electric Mixer tool on the left side your screen. 
  2. From the Options menu (below the drawing screen), select the Outline tool that looks like a worm. 

SlideShow & Animation Tips 
 These abbreviated directions are taken from the Kid Pix Animation & Slide Show Guide from Brøderbund. Written for students, this guide offers step-by-step instructions, sample slide shows on disk and useful blacklines to help students plan and create their own multimedia presentations. 

  1. Create an Animation using a Kid Pix stamp 

    Create a background using Kid Pix and save it. Make a backup and save. 

  2. Decide on a stamp for your animation and decide what it will do. (Some suggestions: a boat that flies, an insect that grows...) 

  3. Place your character on the background and name and save your first picture. Use initials and number: LCR3, for example. 

  4. Take careful notes on your character's location. A grid and notepad would be helpful. List each spot on the grid where your character appears and list the slide name. Hint: Create a grid and copy onto transparency at a copy shop. Tape your grid over your monitor screen using masking tape. 

  5. Continue creating pictures until you have finished creating the animation. 

  6. Put all of your pictures into the slide show in order. 

  7. Run the slide show. Note what you might change or add. 

  8. Make any changes and save your work carefully. Always save a normal file (select Save from the File menu, BEFORE saving as a Standalone). 

  9. Show off your animation! 

Helping Students Get Organized 
Creating a slide show or animation effect requires students to develop and practice good organizational skills. To help them get organized and stay organized, first create individual project folders or directories for each student. This is very important as it is too easy for students (or anyone) to make a mistake and save a picture into the wrong folder and lose it. This is especially true if they are importing graphics and video from other programs or the Internet. 

As students create their individual slides, it is wise to have them identify and order each slide by naming the file with their name and a number. The number should correspond to the order in which the slide appears in their presentations. This will make the process of constructing the slide show faster and easier. 

Saving Slide Shows and Animations as StandAlones 

Never save your slide show as a StandAlone without first saving it normally (saving as a StandAlone creates a Read Only file in which you cannot make changes). To save your slide show as a normal file, select Save a Slide Show from the File menu. After you have saved your slide show as a normal file, then go back and save it as a StandAlone. The program will automatically put the tag ".SA" on the end of your file name, so you will not copy over the original file. 

Slide Show Technical Tip for Macintosh 

If you get an error message: "Problem adding 'snd' resource to scratch file"...  Before saving your slide shows, make sure you have enough hard disk space. This message or a similar message may appear if there is not enough space to save the slide show. If your students are adding sound, animations and video to their slide shows, the files can become quite large.
Check your hard disk space by returning to the finder/desktop; at the top of the screen look for thenumber of MB available. You should have at least 5MB. If you cannot find numbers at the top of your screen, select the View menu on your desktop. Then select View by Small Icon.