I am just getting into game development and would like to be able to make some art for my games. I don't deem myself a very good artist; however, I can do some decent stuff. I drew a cartoon character freehand that was on the cover of a magazine. However, it was unproportional but, it was similar. =) What I would like to know is where should I begin. I assume I need to pick a software package and learn as much about it as I can? I am probably going to use The Gimp unless someone can suggest something better. =) Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.

We've literally had like two threads in the past week asking this exact same question. Normally, I'd ignore it, but did you even bother the search function, reading the FAQs at the top of this forum, or reading some of the other posts on this forum?

Now that is out of the way, I'll be a bit more useful. ;) I'd recommend you pick up the Animator's Survival Kit (which is a very popular and good book), particularly if you're interested in animating. As far as free is concerned, no, you can't really top The Gimp by all that much. CinePaint is another option that is very good if you're watching to get into film/video oriented digital painting and image editing. As far as 3d is concerned, the strongest free 3D package would probably be Blender, with some other interesting options out there like anim8tor and Wings3D. Those I just listed are some of the most popular free softwares out there. On the commercial end, however, the options become even more complicated and I'd recommend reading through the stickies at the top of the forum for more info on that end. [wink]

Gimp isn't that bad... Its the only good opensource photoshop alternative I know.
It has all the options you need to create something nice.

Depending on your art style you might want to consider InkScape instead of Gimp. InkScape is a vector art package, not a raster art package, which can be good for cartoon style art.

Other than that, consider getting a graphics tablet. A good bang for your buck is the Wacom Graphire, especially if you can find one used.