The Fantasy Art of Nikki Burnette: What Are Tubes?

Creative Design Outlet is one of the companies that license my artwork. They sell my artwork in tube packages. One question I get asked frequently is, "What is a tube?" Well, I will try my best to explain it to you! I have to admit, that I didn't know what tubes were until I was approached by a company who sold them. But I did some research and soon found out that there is a lovely tube/tagger community and tubes are widely popular with people who work with computer graphics.

A tube is sort of like clip art. When you purchase a tube from Creative Design Outlet, you will receive a digital file of my artwork. The file is separated into different layers. They take one of my witches, fairies or mermaids and remove the background creating a cut out type image. This way, you can use my fantasy girls to create your own custom computer graphics.

The cut out image is perfect to create your own computer art, because you can overlay fonts, borders and other graphic elements. Usually a finished piece of art made using tubes is called a tag. You can use tags in a variety of places like Facebook, Myspace, forums and more. They are also really fun to create for friends to give as gifts...sort of like a digital e-card! You can make "Happy Birthday," "Thank you" and other holiday related tags.

Make sure to read all of Creative Design Outlet's rules here. There are certain places you can post tags and other places you can't. Also, there is information you have to put on everything that you make using tubes, like a license number and artist name, etc... It's best to get that information right off their website, because they're much better at explaining that part of the process than I am!

Tubes are priced very reasonably. They are only $1.85 each or $5.00 for a set of three. You can also purchase a set of 10 tube packs at a reduced rate.

Here are pictures of some of my tube packages that are available: