My name is Arend Nijdam, and I am an oldtimer, 1947 model, who is completely blown away by two things; graphic software, and my trusty and unusually intelligent mongrel poodle, Lingo. But I won't tell that to him, or he'll get snooty about it :-))

How and why........a kind of happy accident, you could say.... Around 8 years ago, a PC was simply a glorified word-processor to me. Then I came into contact with a system which boasted Windows, a version of Paintbrush, plus a simple dot matrix printer.

Excellent, I thought; you can draw with a whole 256 beautiful colours, and you don't even need a rubber, and then you can print out the result! Couldn't be better!

Sometimes I think back to this time and wonder if it may have been the best time of all. Programs like e.g. Neopaint and Paint were a revelation for me. People now look askance at these programs, because of the sophistication of today's Fractal Painter, Paint Shop Pro and of course Adobe Photoshop. We get easily spoiled and keep pushing out the boundaries of what we expect. There is so much around at the moment that sometimes you feel you can't see the wood for the trees. However, having said that, I would much rather own the newest of the new software myself (as long as my hip-pocket allows it), when I see the advertising material from the distributors and producers of all of this brilliant stuff.