This paper describes an image processing prototyping environment called SharpImage. SharpImage is a stand-alone Windows application geared towards the pre-processing and creation of volume illustrations, although other generic tasks are inherently supported. The user interacts with the environment using a command console, and can view images as a series of slices or through volume rendering. We describe the design and introduce functionality using a number of examples. We have found the environment useful for prototyping a range of image processing tasks and provide the source-code in the hope others may also find it useful.