Have ever wondered how digital illustrations are made? Today's Nerdy Curio from Minute Earth explains the basics. Help us keep making videos by supporting us in.

We try to leave jargon out of our videos, but if you want to learn more about this topic, here are some handy keywords to get your googling started:
- A raster graphics image is a digital image made of a grid of pixels
- Software able to edit raster graphics: Photoshop, Corel Painter, GIMP, Krita, etc.
- GIMP is free and open-source. Check them at

- Krita is also free and open-source.
- Pixel Art is a form of digital art where images are edited on the pixel level.
- Cross-stitch is a popular form of counted-thread embroidery in which X-shaped stitches in a tiled, raster-like pattern are used to form a picture.
- Vector graphics images are made up of mathematical shapes and can be scaled as much as needed without loss in quality.
- Software able to edit vector graphics: Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, Inkscape, etc.
- Inkscape is free and open-source.
- Jaggies is the informal name for artifacts in raster images, most frequently from aliasing.
- Anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing.
- A graphics tablet is a computer input device that enables a user to hand-draw images with a special pen-like stylus, similar to the way a person draws images with a pencil and paper.
- A clipping mask is an object whose shape masks other artwork so that only areas that lie within the shape are visible
- Blend modes (or Mixing modes) in digital image editing are used to determine how two layers are blended into each other. The blending modes I use more frequently are Multiply and Overlay.

Credits (and Twitter handles): Video concept and Narration by Ever Salazar (@eversalazar) With Contributions from: Henry Reich, Alex Reich, Kate Yoshida, Omkar Bhagat, Emily Elert, Peter Reich, Rachel Becker, David Goldenberg Music by: Nathaniel Schroeder: Image Credits: Cross Stitch Pokemon - DeviantArt user MissTetraZelda Isometric Pixel Art - DeviantArt user RGBfumes Pixel Art Wallpaper - Flickr user RodrixAP Vector Corvette Illustration - DeviantArt user troy2007

Aired May 23, 2016

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