Hi there.. I''m pretty new to all this, and it''s come to my attention that I''m going to need a good art program and a little skill with it if I''m going to be creating any snazzy games by myself. My question is what is the best art program for this sort of thing? Also what are several good ones, in case that one is out of my price range. My friend offered to sell me his copy of Photoshop 6 for $150, which seems to be a pretty good deal if I end up using it.. Still mighty expensive for me though. How does photoshop rank for doing this type of work? I was under the impression that it was primarily an image editing program. How are the art creation tools in that package? Do you guys reccomend I go for it? Or should I shop around for something different? Thanks.

nah, Photoshop is THE thing for everything 2d (i make sprites, textures, everything), so if you can afford it, i´d go for that.

Corel Painter is quite good too, but more useful for the fine arts people.

in the 3d sector, milkshape will probably be the tool of your choice (cheap and easy), for the more advanced stuff you´ll probably want to upgrade to 3dsmax (although very expensive).

I''ve not used it (I''m a Painter guy ), but I''ve heard that the Gimp is pretty powerful...especially since it''s absolutely free.

For 2D art, photoshop is the leader in the industry.

If you''re a PC user, you might want to check out PaintShop Pro. PSP is, essentially, a ''clone'' of Photoshop -- it includes many of the same tools, layers support, supports most Photoshop plugins, etc. However, it is significantly cheaper, its about $100 new, you might be able to find a used copy even cheaper.


And even though its much cheaper than Photoshop, it is a really great program. Photoshop does have a few more nifty features, but mainly these are only of use to people doing extremely high-resolution print-work. For game and web graphics, PSP is right up there with it.

You can download a demo version and get more information on PSP from:

www.jasc.com