Creating Original Art

If you plan to become seriously involved in electronic multimedia publishing, acquire the skills in-house for creating images from scratch using paint programs. Finding qualified electronic artists is the most efficient and economical way to create your artwork. Most artists given an electronic stylus and graphics tablet have little trouble learning paint programs.

When you use a paint program to create artwork, you have access to many electronic tools equivalent to those found in an artist's workshop, such as airbrushes and paintbrushes. Paint programs also support smearing, mixing colors, rotating shapes, editing pixels, and many other features that only a computer can provide. All paint programs also provide tools for drawing simple shapes, selecting a portion of a picture, or cropping and resizing the picture.

There are advantages to creating your art:

You have total control over the palette used

You don't have to worry about royalties or copyright concerns

You get exactly what you want

Original artwork is particularly useful for icons, buttons, small graphics, and animations. It is also the only effective way to get good 16-color images. Artists used to working within the constraints of 16 colors can do very impressive work—just look at video games.