Using image textures to create materials is a very common workflow. The benefits of images are that they are immediately from real life and so can convey believable results quickly. If the wood, tile, and marble's node trees made your head hurt, image textures are a gentler alternative. Image textures can also be reprocessed with nodes or image editors, turning a single photo into roughness, metal, specular, and normal maps. In the later Baby Dragon chapters, you'll also use images to store custom textures for a character. Plant alpha cards are one example of using image textures and encapsulate all of the problems that image textures might bring up: alpha transparency, normal maps, and bit depth.
The detailed silhouettes ...
