1 Iki Piki: You had pizza, hot dogs, doughnuts, and ice cream just before skewing into hyperspace?
1 Serron: Yep, why?
2 Paris: Skewing now!
3 Paris: There we are. Hyperspace. That was a bit stomach wrenching.
4 Paris: Where'd Serron go?
4 Iki Piki: He's lost his... Well, I hate to dignify it with the word "lunch".

I created the background in panel 2 from a blank image in Photoshop with about 5 clicks on different menu items.

I don't claim to be skilled at creating art from blank canvas, but many visual artists these days use programs like Photoshop rather than traditional media of paints and pencils. And if you weren't aware of it, the results can be virtually indistinguishable from scans of artwork painted on canvas or paper. The electronic tools are so good these days that much of the artwork you see these days has been created entirely digitally.

And I don't just mean the obvious stuff like geometric logos and so forth. I mean stuff that looks like intricately detailed and lifelike paintings. For example, a significant fraction of the fantasy artwork painted for games such as Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering has been created digitally, without a brush ever going near a blob of paint. For example, former MtG art director Matt Cavotta works almost entirely digitally. You can see some of his art here, and here. For more variety by other artists, check here.

Imagine what van Gogh could have done with a copy of Photoshop and a stylus.

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2023-01-22 Rerun commentary: Wow. Looking back, it's hard to imagine a time when digital art was so new that I felt a need to explain to people that it existed.

Anyone can do it now with an iPad or other tablet, a stylus tool or just your fingers, and any of hundreds of readily available digital painting apps.

For context, when I wrote the above annotation, it was almost a year before the first iPad was released.