My kids love to paint ... and make a mess! Here's the solution -

ArtRage is a free painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons, and other tools. You can run ArtRage on a normal Windows machine with a mouse, but it works particularly well if you have a graphics tablet. Even better, running ArtRage on a TabletPC takes advantage of the unique interaction of pen and screen to produce a realistic painting feel.

ArtRage is all about playing with paint without the mess, and having fun in the process. You can paint your own image from a blank canvas to completed work, or load in a picture to trace and have the tools pick their colours for you as you paint over it. Check out the ArtRage Gallery.

ArtRage was grand prize winner of the 'Microsoft Tablet PC Does Your Application Think in Ink?' competition and was selected as the overall winner from 260 submissions from Independent Software Venders from around the world.