The Success of making an image 
relies upon understanding the tools you use.
While computer paint programs more and more
mimic brushes and sprayers and pallete
knifes, the real tools are the Discrete Fourier
Transform, and other mathmatical expressions
that comprise an operation executed upon an image.  

Take a closer look above at the Painter's face,
and realize there is no face. Only a bubble.
With such a broad range of colors numbering in the 
millions optical illusions can be performed,
blemishes can be hidden, Celebrity nude photos
easily faked. You don't have 
to draw precisely to convey your image
because the human brain is a great pattern
recognition machine. Depth is acheived
by layering reductions of the same image
successively upon itself. 
Atmosphere is derived by opaque scattering,
or by light & shadow, or just good color schemes.

Here's our Bicycle project drawn from Simple 
vectors in Microsoft Draw, Copied to the clipboard,
and then both Layering and Atmosphere were added. 
Click on the Thumbnails below to see full size
  

Notice that the second bike is a JPEG image.
It is roughly Half the size of the same GIF.
Gif is best for short looped Animations,   
and scenes with Flat color spans. Your 
audience has a short attention span, so Keep 
your images managable. The Red tile background
for Modular reality should have been a jpeg.
Consider it an bad oversight on my part.
  
(to be continued...)