[Kosmos]

Before you spend a whole bunch of time doing the actual art work. I would really, really suggest downloading as many of the skinned interfaces as you can.

See how they are doing it.

It would really help you alot to understand the way the rectangular styles, icons, and images work with the UI builder, how they get pieced together, stretched or tiled etc..

Although it's probably not needed. You could I suppose edit over the top of the other frames etc.. that are included with the game, but...

I can almost promise you will run into some problems along the lines, maybe finding a piece doesnt' excatly fit or something.

Understanding how to create your own image files, and piece the frames together yourself will give you MUCH, MUCH more freedom, instead of having to limit your artwork to the constraints of the current UI system.

The sizes of the pieces are 100% adjustible by you, so like I said, forcing that creative nature of yours into the pre-defined boxes of the current UI tempalte, is really gonna suck.

I for one am eager to see what you come up with once you get up to speed.

It takes a while, I still don't understand all about the UI. The artwork stuff has been one of the areas I have avoided mostly. But I've finally figured 90% of that out. It's really hard to describe that in text, you just gotta dig in and start changing things and see what changes on the screen.

The nice thing is that almost all the graphics changes can be viewed in the UI Builder, which is pleasent, considering other type of projects require us to log in and out of the game about a million times to test that things are working correctly.

Pick a window you are familiar with, and figure out how to get it to show up in the UI Builder.
Then learn how to change the framestyle, to another frame style.
Then learn how to change a single piece of that frame, like one of the corner pieces to something else.
This will take you into the individual image files. Check the FAQs on this board for some good pointers about that.
Once you learn how the selection regions work with the current .dds files, you can get a better idea of what sort of artwork you can create, and how to tell the UI builder to use your artwork.
There are little differences in all the styles, buttonstyles, icons, images, etc.. they all have there little perks.

I think you will find yourself in a much better position to start your art work if you go this direction.
The last thing you want to do is spend gobs of time on pretty artwork, and then not be able to get it to work the way you envisioned.