CD-Rom -- ''Crayola Amazing Art Adventure''

"Crayola Amazing Art Adventure" "Crayola Art Studio" Micrografx Inc. (800) 676-3110 Windows $45 each

Few brand names are better known to children than Crayola crayons, packed in the familiar green and yellow box by Binney & Smith Inc.

Micrografx Inc., a developer of desktop publishing and graphics software, has pulled off an impressive marketing coup by licensing the Crayola name for a new line of children's software. The first result of this alliance - "Crayola Amazing Art Adventure" for ages 3 to 6 and "Crayola Art Studio" for ages 6 to 12 - does credit to both companies.

The two products were introduced on floppy disk in April and are just now coming out on CD-ROM for Windows, with Macintosh CD-ROMs promised by the end of the year.

"Art Adventure" is packed with 10 coloring books, each offering eight on-screen pages that children fill in by selecting from an assortment of 12 colors. Many of the coloring book pages are interactive. Silly Scenes invites children to figure out what doesn't belong in the picture - a giraffe standing with cows in a barnyard, for example - and gives them a round of applause after they identify the mistake.

For the junior Picasso who feels confined by a coloring book's pre-drawn images, there is Beginner Paint, which transforms the computer screen into a blank canvas. Budding artists can select from a variety of tools to draw either fine lines or broad lines, play with geometric shapes, type in letters or words, add "sticker" images or insert "moving toys" such as a frog that hops across the screen.

Although "Art Adventure" itself is well-designed, I have two complaints with Micrografx's approach.

First, installing the program requires an awesome 15 megabytes of precious hard-disk space. It can be run straight off the CD-ROM, without downloading any files, but I had trouble saving artwork that way.

Second, the package is stuffed with almost as many commercials as a Saturday morning cartoon show. The CD-ROM includes five video clips, each running two to three minutes, that explain the history of Crayola crayons and how they are made. The narration, regrettably, is heavy on hype for other Binney & Smith products.

Still, if you can spare 15 megs on your hard drive and you're up for the task of diverting your children from the crass commercialism, "Art Adventure" won't disappoint its preschool audience.

"Art Studio," too, will provide hours of entertainment for the elementary-school crowd. The eight coloring books are pitched toward a somewhat older audience and include both a "fashion designer" book and a "vehicle designer" book. Be warned, though: "Art Studio" is another hard-disk hog, demanding 16 megabytes.