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I'm a programmer but having worked in the game industry for many years I grew to know a lot about game art, both on paper (concept sketches and paintings) and on the computer.

First, it's a skill that can be learned like any other. Sure, some people have a natural talent, and others don't (like me). There are also people who are natural programmers, and they will always be the best at it; but anyone can learn to program if they really want to.

I've ended up doing tons of stand-in art for games, and a lot of it ended up going into the final game, because it was Good Enough. Usually it was character animations and interface elements, basically the easy stuff, but still - it goes to show you that there isn't as much of a line between the artistically talented and someone who can just learn to work the tools.

Here's a few random tips from my many years of hanging around with really talented artists as well as my own tinkering:

Tools - I'm pleased to say that the OSS art tools you can get today for photo art and 3D are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts for many tasks. I've used Photoshop, Maya, 3D Studio Max (and the original 3D Studio, for that matter), and Lightwave in the course of my career, but I find that the Gimp (for 2D) and Blender (for 3D) are today better, or at least as good as, most of the commercial offerings. One thing about this may be that both of these programs are geared more towards programmers-become-artists than pure artists, which may be why I find them more intuative and powerful.

Color - Color is a huge element. Crappy shapes with a good color scheme actually look pretty good; nice shapes with a crappy color scheme always look bad. Typically you want to combine complimentary colors - purple and gold, for example - in a way that is pleasing to the eye. It can be tricky to get this right, but one trick you can do is use the color wheel in Gimp. Find the first color you are going to use, and then go to the exact opposite side - that's your complimentary color. Note that a muted color (tan, for example) should fill more, proportionately, of the image than its bright complimentary color (red, for example). When in doubt, go look at a nice-looking website and steal their colorscheme.

Compositing - You can do a LOT by compositing photographs and other existing graphic elements. For example I made the header image for this website by compositing shots I had taken in New Oreans, plus a couple photos from images.google.com eg, Stonehenge in the lower left corner). Using the Gimp's color adjustment tools, scale, resize, rotate, and opacity, you can collage together a bunch of unrelated images and end up with something that looks pretty cool.

Learn Blender - A great way to make a final image is to create a central element in 3D, and then paste it into an image and edit it up with the Gimp. That's how I did the graphics for this site, for example. Blender is surprisingly easy to learn; this excellent tutorial will have you up and running in no time. I was creating elements usable for compositing in my 2D images in a matter of hours after I started learning it. (Of course, I have a lot of experience using other modelers, so it may take a complete 3D novice longer.)

Last of all, I will suggest the tried-and-true method for self-teaching yourself almost anything: duplicate! Go find a piece of art that you think is attractive. Study it closely. Pick it apart. Now try to create your own version of the same thing using whatever tools you are trying to learn. The process of taking apart someone else's image will teach you a lot about the elements that experienced creators use.

I'm rather shocked to see all the complaints about the Gimp here. The comments seem to be divided into two categories:

1. I've never used it, but from the screenshots it looks scary! It sucks!

2. I've used it, and it didn't work exactly like Photoshop. It sucks!

As a person who has used Photoshop (and a bevy of other paint programs, all the way back to the days of DPaint) extensively, I feel the Gimp is by far the best program available for creating (pixel-based) graphics, especially in the realm of web imagery.

I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and this. I have also used it to do many print items, such as this flyer. (Amazingly enough, CMYK is not really that necessary if you don't mind slight variations in the color on the final product. If you are doing serious print work, you should really be using a vector illustration program for everything but photo retouching anyhow.)

I think perhaps the Gimp's strength is how a non-artist (ie, me) can create pretty nice looking art with it - as I believe the links above will attest. It has a number of features not found in any other paint program, such as highly configurable tablet sensitivity.

Unfortunately, the hardest thing about using it for someone who has switched from Photoshop is that it looks _very_ similar to Photoshop, but yet it is really not very similar at all. Much like an expencied Windows user switching to KDE, they will find themselves fooled into expecting the interface to behave exactly the same way - and it doesn't. It's a different program, with a different interface.

But those who either have the patience to un-learn their Photoshop habits, or are not burdened by them to begin with, will find the Gimp to be one of the most powerful graphics tools available today. It is also quite likely one of the most impressive and mature applications available in the realm of free software - on par with Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Evolution. I'm not sure why it doesn't get the same respect that these packages do.

I'm rather shocked to see all the complaints about the Gimp here. The comments seem to be divided into two categories:

1. I've never used it, but from the screenshots it looks scary! It sucks!

2. I've used it, and it didn't work exactly like Photoshop. It sucks!

As a person who has used Photoshop (and a bevy of other paint programs, all the way back to the days of DPaint) extensively, I feel the Gimp is by far the best program available for creating (pixel-based) graphics, especially in the realm of web imagery.

I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and this. I have also used it to do many print items, such as this flyer. (Amazingly enough, CMYK is not really that necessary if you don't mind slight variations in the color on the final product. If you are doing serious print work, you should really be using a vector illustration program for everything but photo retouching anyhow.)

I think perhaps the Gimp's strength is how a non-artist (ie, me) can create pretty nice looking art with it - as I believe the links above will attest. It has a number of features not found in any other paint program, such as highly configurable tablet sensitivity.

Unfortunately, the hardest thing about using it for someone who has switched from Photoshop is that it looks _very_ similar to Photoshop, but yet it is really not very similar at all. Much like an expencied Windows user switching to KDE, they will find themselves fooled into expecting the interface to behave exactly the same way - and it doesn't. It's a different program, with a different interface.

But those who either have the patience to un-learn their Photoshop habits, or are not burdened by them to begin with, will find the Gimp to be one of the most powerful graphics tools available today. It is also quite likely one of the most impressive and mature applications available in the realm of free software - on par with Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Evolution. I'm not sure why it doesn't get the same respect that these packages do.

Christopher Lawrence
Sandra Collins
Nicholas Bennsion
Adam Wiggins (shameless plug)

The format looks cool, but it's still rough. I've been offering both MP3 and Vorbis from my download page for a while, and the few people that do try out the Vorbis version have complaints like:

- Can't get it to work with winamp
- Can't download it on Macintosh due to screwey MIME types
- My own complaint: the file is signifigantly larger than the matching MP3, yet the sound quality is noticably worse.

I'll check out this new beta. I'd say don't throw out notlame or your mp3 players just yet, but hopefully it will be up to par with MP3s (and maybe better!) very soon.

Oh, a point in its favor: getting the plugin for playing the files running on xmms was a breeze.

Silly rabit, vinyl is for DJs.