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Thanks, I had not heard about that before. Although a little sad, as I know a lot of casual users using it right now (even including some young kids). But I guess at least the "Creating Original Art" can be seen as targeting people like game developers.

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Casual users (including kids) have been creating art with Photoshop for some time now.

At any rate, there are multiple free software packages that can do the "creating art" job at least as acceptably as GIMP. Consider MyPaint or Krita.

MyPaint and Krita are actually both great programs for digital painting. David Revoy is an artist who uses both (and also created one of the brush sets for MyPaint) and his work is worth looking at: http://www.davidrevoy.com/2-portfolio.html

He has a number of tutorials available on his site too: http://www.davidrevoy.com/4-tutorials.html

I believe he also uses Gimp with the Gimp Paint Studio presets for some things: http://code.google.com/p/gps-gimp-paint-studio/

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