Introduction

The world is changing in dramatic ways. Not too many years ago, cutting-edge digital art was represented by images created pixel by pixel and limited to 256 colors. Computers that were capable of creating digital art were expensive and pretty unsophisticated compared to today's standards. A 20-megabyte (MB) hard drive was large, and a single megabyte of RAM was $40. I remember well spending $320 to upgrade my computer to 16MB of RAM. And there was no such thing as a stylus to paint with. Every image you created was done with a mouse.

We've come a long way. Very powerful and capable computers are available for less than $1,000. Hard drives are measured in hundreds of gigabytes (GB), with an average-size 500GB hard drive costing less ...

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