Okay, thanks.
Dunno what most of those terms mean straight away, but will look them up when I have time.
Still hoping to get a better device for doing some base line-work on, though I should probably brush up on my pencil-and-paper drawing skills in the meantime. Can’t do much drawing at all if I don’t review the basics first, unfortunately.
Hmm, well:
Websafe: Certain colors are standardized and will appear in every web browser the same way. Other colors may vary or dither depending on the browser. This is significantly less important than it was years ago as browsers have gotten more advanced, but some web developers still prefer to use only websafe colors that will look the same to everybody rather than risk different users seeing different things.
CMYK: Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK. These are the colors of ink in your printer. A computer monitor uses red green and blue but you can't print in those colors, stuff like royal purple or vivid blue* won't print due to how the inks mix. If you want to print something from a standard printer you need to use CMYK colors.
RGB vs. CMYK? What's the difference between these color modes and when should you use RGB and CMYK? Find simple, definitive answers in this guide for designers.
www.vecteezy.com
Bitmap (Also called Raster): A way of drawing that uses individual pixels. F'rex a circle isn't, to the computer, a circle, it's a series of individual dots that happen to form a round shape when a human views them all at the same time.
Vector: A way of drawing that uses shapes. F'rex a circle is a center point and a radius, and the computer draws the circle for you based on those two numbers. Add two radii and get an oval, and so forth. This gives you less direct control over each individual pixel but makes smoother shapes than can be easily resized, and also take up vastly less space in your hard drive because the drawing is a series of mathematical formula rather than the individual positions and values of several million dots.
Modern printers generally print in Bitmap while there are old-school printers called
plotters that actually swing a pen across the paper and used vector graphics. In the modern day, ink plotters are pretty rare but plotters with a blade on them that cut out shapes for manufacturing are still in common use and they only work with Vector instructions since they need a mathematically defined path for the blade to follow, not a grid of individual dots.
Professional designers do not need a reminder of how to use vector and raster graphics. But, beginners sometimes get confused.
filecamp.com
*There are specialized inks called Pantones that actually produce such colors, however they're fairly expensive and most works will only use them as spots, hence why frequently my pics are black and white except for small spot colors, those are designed to facilitate Pantone prints. A lot of oddities in how I draw are actually old-school methods for accommodating different printer types.