I got Appleworks and I hate it. I used to use MSpaint all the time. Appleworks is not intuitive at all. Sorry I have no recommendations but try appleworks before you buy it.
Tux paint is probably exactly what your looking for. Simple little program for painting which is still actually kinda cool. As aways you can get it at versiontracker. Nice little 3mb download. It has everything I can think of that ms paint has (but I never realy used it so I could be wrong) and few more cool little features.