Heh. Just got around to reading this, this morning. It actually gave me some memories, of those days.
When I was a young man, I wanted to be a SciFi book cover artist. I wasn't half bad, but I wasn't a master, either.
I figured out that even a mediocre programmer could do better than even a really well-known commercial artist (which I was not really assured of).
Here's a couple of examples of the kind of stuff I was doing in the 1980s: