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The soft, pleasing blur of the out-of-focus parts of a photo, often turning background lights into gentle glowing circles.

A hand-drawn outline saved with an image that tells software exactly which part to keep and which to hide, used to cut a subject cleanly out of its background.

Early illustrations that explore how characters, places, or products might look, made to guide a film, game, or design before the final version is built.

A shading method that uses layers of crisscrossing parallel lines — more layers and tighter spacing make an area look darker.

An image reproduced using just two ink colors blended together, often one dark and one bright, giving a stylish two-tone look.

An image made by cutting fine grooved lines into a metal plate and printing from it — the source of the detailed line style seen on old banknotes and portraits.

A modern illustration style built from simple shapes and solid colors with little or no shading or realistic depth.

A tool for creating photorealistic vector artwork by laying a flexible grid over a shape and blending different colors smoothly across its points.

The large, attention-grabbing picture placed at the top of a web page or poster to set the mood and pull people in.

An automatic process that converts a pixel-based picture into scalable vector shapes by detecting its outlines.

A drawing style that shows objects in 3D at a fixed angle where parallel lines never converge, so near and far parts stay the same size — common for tech scenes and infographics.

An illustration drawn purely with solid lines and no shading or color fills, like a coloring-book outline.

A print made by carving a design into a sheet of soft linoleum, inking the raised surface, and pressing it onto paper, giving bold shapes and visible carved marks.

A 3D or illustration style that builds shapes out of a small number of flat triangles, creating a faceted, geometric look.

A highly detailed painted (now usually digital) backdrop used to create realistic scenery or environments that would be impossible or too costly to photograph.

A single image created by combining pieces of several photographs into one composed scene.

An illustration made by placing individual pixels by hand on a small grid, giving a deliberately blocky, retro video-game look.

A picture made of a fixed grid of tiny colored dots called pixels; zoom in far enough and the dots become visible, so the image looks blocky or blurry.

The solid, filled-in outline shape of a subject shown as a single flat color with no interior detail, like a shadow.

A small, standalone drawing used to decorate or accent a page — like the little pictures beside a magazine article — rather than a full-page image.

A shading technique that builds up tone and texture using many small dots — the denser the dots, the darker the area appears.

An image built from mathematical shapes, lines, and curves rather than a grid of pixels, so it stays perfectly crisp at any size.

A soft fade around the edges of an image so the picture gradually blends into the background or darkens toward the corners, drawing the eye to the center.