I design board games for fun and unrealistic dreams of making entire hundreds of dollars. But the part I suck at is making art and iconography. So I'm spending some time learning how to drive GIMP and Inkscape. Just this week I have completely finished the game I've been working on for six months now: http://www.drtomallen.com/half-the-battle.html (unfortunately the manufacturer is in lock-down, so the only option to play it is to print your own...)
I'm still awful at it, but I can now manipulate art from other sources fairly comfortably. And I'm at a point where I can make geometric types of shapes and patterns easily enough from scratch. It's already enough that I look at logos and things differently now, to see how I would go about building them in these tools.
Unfortunately, I still dislike this aspect of game design compared to the fun of lying in a hammock and run thought experiments on the actual gameplay systems!
I'm still awful at it, but I can now manipulate art from other sources fairly comfortably. And I'm at a point where I can make geometric types of shapes and patterns easily enough from scratch. It's already enough that I look at logos and things differently now, to see how I would go about building them in these tools.
Unfortunately, I still dislike this aspect of game design compared to the fun of lying in a hammock and run thought experiments on the actual gameplay systems!