well tho i havent been here for a while this thread caught my eyes and after reading thro it i just had to post!
Rotonen i cant still thank you enough for introducing me to TileStudio.
for graphical ***** Pshop is indeed a great tool, for bending pictures to show something totaly different then what it is photoshop is really great... for making tiles .... you dont use a bazooka to kill an ant...
Tilestudio (for Windows users, with Wine for Linux) is a simple yet extremely useful program to make textures and tiles. for characters i would go with something more of a layer oriented program like gimp or Pshop since its alot easier (for me anyway) to work with moving objects in layers for animation perspective.
after checking out i really _really_ wish i could try Idraw but all the buttons makes confused already -_-
aaah well its late might be that >_> and ooh well probably something you get after time.
So all i can say is for making tiles get TileStudio and try it, i tell you its awesome how they tile it up for you while you work with the same tile and all the tiles change after everytime yuo change something, easy to notice when you missplace something or want to make a tile while using the borders of the to transcede to the next tile so they "stick" together... if you get what i say -_-
200 thumbs up for tilestudio
*thanks again rotonen!*