I use Inkscape on a daily basis. Inkscape is a vector image editing software, comparable to Adobe’s Illustrator product. Inkscape is of course free and open source project, which is great. They’re working on getting a new version out the door, but for now version 0.46 is a solid release. You can use Inkscape to create W3C standard SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) images, which means that these images are web compliant.

Heathenx has some awesome tutorials, I recommend keeping up on them. They’ve taught me a lot of things about Inkscape that I didn’t previously know.