Such an Initial Expense

My daughter is 11 years old and about to turn 12. She is a wonderful child in so many ways, and one of her wys is to be artistic. She loves drawing and modelling and just about anything i would term as artistic. She is also excited when i get art into my games. Or anything for that matter haha!

Ok, back to the point. As she observes what i do when making games, she has gotten quite knowledgable in certain aspects of game creation. One of those aspects is the use of pictures. Hence i have my daughters apple rendition in my upcoming game. Thank goodness she is more talented than me. However she now understands such things as stop motion from the movie industry and of course frame or cell animations for use in games. This has gotten her quite excited and now her skills with Paint.net are really starting to shine, she wants to have a go at animating some of the creatures she has created and drawn.

So here i am trying hard to satisfy my daughters creative longing. Heck i would love her to learn to animate stuff on the computer. Who knows what could happen with her doing artwork for my designs and programming. But.. and this is the the reason for the title of the piece. The expense of buying something like TVPaint is pretty horrendous for just playing with. Professional tools just cost so much (300 bucks for that one). however i do not feel like i have so much choice, except maybe for Pro Motion at 98 dollars. My current artist loves this package, but i feel it is a bit antiquated for what she will want, compared to paint.net even.

So what to do? How should i help her realise her dreams of animating her Dracow or Biger ?

I know it is hard for the software tools people to really make money with so much piracy going on, but i do love it when there are learning versions of software. I wonder if these learning versions actually work to get people to buy them? don't get me wrong, i will pay whatever i have to for software for my home (i hate piracy), but it can so ridiculously expensive. With my daughter only being 11, she does not have college identification, and i do not either. Could this be an issue for obtaining a student version? Maybe schools should buy special version to lease or sell to their students?

As you can tell i have not got an answer to all this. I just know i don't wanna spend 300 bucks. Then omeone mentioned flash.. This sounds great, but it is really hard to know where to start. Even what software i should be downloading to get her going is real tough. Maybe i need to keep searching and reading for another couple of hours, maybe then i will have the answer.

G'night and don't spend all your hard earned cash!