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Hey Hey,

I love flash it looks so cool!

My question is, are you guys really really talented artists?
Or is flash that easy to use?

My skills as an artist are very very limited, which makes designing web graphics a process of leeching a few cool wallpapers or pics and then blending them together adding some text and maybe a few filters... there has to be a better way for the artistically impaired.

As far as Flash animations are concerned, Swish can spit out some pretty good stuff without having to learn much. Flash itself can take a while to get to grips with. Everyone I know who uses it is still learning stuff all the time.
I can't think of an easier way to make images other than what you're already doing though.

From my experiences , it depends what u want from flash if its easy or not, most text effects, and things like that can be learned pretty easily, my fave is still the glint effect which is actually simple once u do it right the first time.

Since u mentioned filters, i think u may be using photoshop, if so there are plenty of tutorials out there to help ya, and then u can bring certain elements of this into flash.

Other than that the staff here are actually really talented artists, so dont expect to get there results straight off, but its very possible in time

.

Note: im neither staff nor can i make images, i like leeching lmao

As for the graphics side of your question, I see nothing wrong with combining images that are already made and applying filters, etc. to come up with something new - as long as the original images aren't copyrighted and/or as long as you have the owner's permission to use their images. Personally, there's too much stuff out there already in the public domain that I can pull from to take someone else's images. I have a whole slew of bookmarks of free stock photo and clipart sites, as well as cds full of images that are royalty free.

Contrary to a popular myth on the Internet, the "borrowing" of someone else's images and changing them a bit by adding your text or changing the color does not make the owner's copyright null and void. The law in this area is really tricky as to exactly how much the original image has to be changed before you can claim it as your own.

With that said, there are also tons and tons of tutorials on the Internet for learning how to create graphics, especially for Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Do a google search for whatever graphics program you have. I'm sure you'll find at least a handful of tutorials for it. I can't even begin to tell you how many tutorials I've done over the years. That's how you learn.
It just takes practice, practice, practice.

Then, once you get those techniques down pat, play around with your graphics program. Every time I see a cool effect, I try to find a tutorial for it. If I can't find one, I open my graphics program and try to recreate it myself - and then I try to make it better. Experiment. You'll soon develop a style of your own. Then you won't need to use anyone else's images because you'll have your own repository to pull from.

My latest challenge is to learn everything I can about Adobe Illustrator, although there aren't a whole lot of tutorials out there for it. My goal is to be able to create my own clipart and not have to rely on clipart sites for my sources. I've been able to come up with a few things that I'm pretty proud of and I don't ever have to worry that it's copyrighted by someone else, because I know that it was made by me.

Hope this helps,
Kelly