There are three choices there: Top 200, which contains the most frequently used images on Mixel (just like we had before) and two new ones, which pull Disrupt-related images from Twitter and Flickr. Those last two are updating in real time, so if you’re at the conference, or even tuning in from afar, you have access to images you can start working with right away.

These options are stored on our servers, so we’ll be changing them up from time to time, synchronizing them with various events like Disrupt, or highlighting specific kinds of images on holidays or other special occasions. To access them, you’ll need to upgrade to the latest version of Mixel, 1.5. As always, it’s free in the App Store.

What’s more, you still do have the ability to save a snapshot of each mixel, once it’s been posted. As soon as you post a mixel—public or private—the “Share this mixel” panel appears: if it’s public, you can of course send it out to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, but you can also save it to your iPad Photos. If it’s a private mixel, Save to Photos is still available.

In fact, this snapshot function is available any time you tap the Share button on all of your mixels, and on public mixels by any other user. We hope that helps clear up the confusion, and please, keep those comments and suggestions coming!

Think back, way back, to your elementary-school art class. You and your mom may have thought the Crayola hand-turkey drawing and macaroni picture frame you made were swell, but the times, they have a-changed. Today, a bunch of Seattle first graders has you beat.

The framed artwork above is a group collage composed of sixteen lovely individual Mixel collages created by six and seven year olds at John Hay Elementary School.

Impressed? We are.

The kids did have some guidance from parent volunteer Miriam Marcus, who thought of using Mixel for her son’s class submission to the school’s annual art auction. Each classroom makes one piece, and they typically sell for hundreds of dollars.

When we asked Miriam why she chose our app, she said, “I thought Mixel would be fun for the kids who love technology, and be a way that they could create their own unique compositions yet maintain a consistent palette of shapes and colors to achieve a cohesive end result.”

To begin the project, Miriam first created a small number of simple geometric pieces—colored squares, rectangles, and circles—and arranged them in a starting mixel using our new feature, Private Threads. Private threads can be especially useful for kids’ projects like this, or any collaboration not yet ready to be shared with the world.

After showing the first graders the basics like deleting, copying, and resizing, she let them run free. Playing and creating came naturally to them. “Once we showed them how Mixel worked,” Miriam said, “every kid jumped in—not a single one asked if they were doing it right or said they didn’t know what to do.”

After each student created a mixel, Miriam used Mixel’s Snapshot feature to export it to her photo album. The mixels were then arranged into a grid, printed on fine art paper, and professionally matted and framed. The final work, titled Re-Mix (2012), cost $140—$100 for the layout and print, and $40 for the 24” x 36” frame. Miriam got generous price discounts when the printer and framer learned that Re-Mix was made for a school art auction.

And that’s how a meta-collage by first graders was born. It will be up for auction at the school’s benefit this Saturday, so interested buyers from the Mixelverse should grab their last-minute flights to Seattle now.

We hope the Hay Elementary project and Private Threads will inspire you to help kids make art together, raise funds for your own group, or maybe just re-inspire your first-grade self. Go ahead—now you can finally mixel that postmodern hand-turkey series you’ve been seeing in your dreams.

With a Private Thread, you can choose the people you want to share a mixel with. Once posted, only those people will be able to see it, comment on it or remix it. If you’ve invited people who are already using Mixel, they’ll get a notification in the handy new Inbox. If you want to invite someone who’s not yet on Mixel, no problem, we’ll send them an invitation to join via email or Facebook.

We hope Private Threads will encourage you to use Mixel in new ways: share mixels with just family members, collaborate on ideas with colleagues, create a scrapbook for just yourself. Any image you add to a Private Thread is secure (no one will be able to reuse outside of the same thread), so if you have had reservations about using your personal photos, you can now feel free to do so.

There’s plenty more in version 1.4, too. Here’s a brief rundown:

Retina ready! We’ve upgraded the entire Mixel interface to take advantage of the new iPad’s beautiful, high definition screen.

Invite anyone to any thread! See a mixel that someone you know would love to remix? Now you can send them an invite so they can join in the fun.

New user inbox. Tap on your name and picture at the top right of Mixel’s home screen to see all the latest activity that’s directly relevant to you.

New, more convenient remix button! Now you can remix any mixel right from the thread view.

New, quicker navigation within threads! New buttons within the thread view (at the top left and top right, just below the Mixel bar) now let you skip ahead to the end, or back to the start. Super-handy for very long threads.

Random images! Looking for some inspiration? Now when you tap Add Images, Mixel gives you the option to load randomly selected images, twelve at a time.

Featured mixels! Mixel is now highlighting special threads that we invite everyone to join in on; you can find these at the top of the Popular tab.

As always, we’re extremely interested in what you think, and any other suggestions and concerns you have. So let us know what you’re thinking over at our User Voice page.

Download Mixel 1.4 from the App Store today. Thank you for being an important part of the ever-growing Mixel community.

Now Mixel user David Jacobs has had one of his mixels selected for a gallery exhibition of “Bacon and Beer Art, part of Boston Bacon and Beer Week. One look at the mixel that was selected and you’ll see why its inclusion was practically a fait accompli.

David Jacobs made this mixel. Apr 26, 2012

Open this mixel.

Congratulations David!

You can read more about Stezaker at his Saatchi Gallery page. You can also flip through a slideshow of the “Marriage” series, which I highly recommend.

Coming Soon to an App Store near you: Mixel 1.4, our hottest, most Mixely version ever. Watch this blog for all the juicy details, arriving very soon. As always, happy collaging!

Armand has stashed hidden items within the virtual drawers of his main image. Pull on a drawer and you’ll see its ‘contents.’ My favorite is the sly joke in the bottom-most drawer — exactly where I used to keep my own copies of the same, actually.

Kidding aside, this is what keeps us going at Mixel: watching the fantastic community do things we never imagined when we first built it. Fantastic work, Armand! I can’t wait to see what others can do with this same idea.

In the course of explaining the inspiration for founding Lascaux Co. and creating Mixel (“we really want to help everybody to rediscover their creativity”), and the theoretical and technical underpinnings of why it works so well, Khoi also highlights, in insightful detail, the fantastic work of a bunch of Mixel users, including John S. DeFord, Marie Innes, Monte Merritt, Senongo Akpem, and Cyndi Vander Ven, among others. You can check that section out starting at 28:30 of the video. For me, the key takeaway is how great it is to be part of this still nascent, encouraging, and constructive social network that offers, through so much daily inspiration, the chance for us to reconnect with our uninhibited creative selves. Take a quick bow, Khoi.