Greets all, been a while. Gonna try the game design thing again with more time on my hands. I have a scanner and some decent drawing talent but i'm lost when it comes to digital illustration. I tried scanning a drawing I made to photoshop for editing but it would've been so time consuming to clear all the pictures off the edges and fine tune the lines (my brother told me not to use photoshop for that). I'm basically asking whats the easiest and cleanest way to get art from paper to the screen so that it's easy to edit, outline, and still retain the look from the paper (gritty, cartoon, fantasy, etc) - using flash makes for a good outline but it looks too cartoonish and I don't know enough about getting better images from it (though I never tried reducing line thickness come to think of it...) P.S. - I played a new MMO called Atlantica with an ad saying if you don't like the game we'll pay cash for your character. I played for about a day, got to lvl 15 and was instantly hit with the typical grind for items/exp bit. Decent game but same old gameplay. Made me want to take this back up.

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Thanks, that's almost what i'm looking for.
The almost is because OMG IT TOOK 12 HOURS TO VECTOR ALL THAT!

However, this is what every artist should know. At least lucky for me the only things I need to vector are some small things and not a huge and detailed sketch!

You need a tablet so you can draw directly freehand to the screen. All the artists @ work use Wacom tablets (the most elite get the Cintiq ones where you literally draw on the display): http://www.wacom.com/index2.php

None of the big enough tablets are cheap tho [smile]

Relatedly a friend of mine does digital art w/ a tablet in Corel Painter. You can see his stuff here:
http://sketchbook.dangermarc.com/sketchbook

-me