For a person without a single artistic bone in his body this pretty much amounts to magic no matter how simple it looks. I'm sticking to programming.
Thanks for that :)
But to know that these few simple things are enough to make a nice-looking under-sea background -- well, that takes artistic skill.
I think everyone can get pretty far to surprise themselves doing anything if they really tried. It might take you more sweat. It might take you more time. But I have a hard time believing that you can't do this because you don't have an elusive amorphous quality called 'artistic ability'.
If you give any consideration at all to bracket placement, use of whitespace, grouping of code, etc. then I am certain you are much more artistic than you give yourself credit for. The rest comes down to practice with different mediums.
Factoring might be a better example- picking the most convenient order for subroutine arguments, choosing how to bring together redundant segments of code, how to best use language constructs to express the problem. Ultimately I think it's difficult to draw a direct comparison, though- in my opinion, the similarities between graphic art and programming are rather abstract.
Interestingly, this gets much more important in a language with currying.
(I do have to work through that "Draw on the Right Side of your Brain" book sometimes, though)
However, taking those concepts and doing a jungle theme with monkeys and vines will be a stretch if you lack the experience as there's no step-by-step to get the right proportions for those shapes.
That's the great thing about cartoony illustrations -- the right proportions don't matter. If you're really worried about it, just trace a photograph and go from there.