While the author of BrowserQuests™ (Scott M. Huelsman) can do a lot of things well, developing custom fantasy artwork from scratch is not one of them. Fortunately, there are a variety of professional tools on the market for doing this, and the game's author would like to acknowledge these fantastic products!
Character Portraits
Wondering how the various graphic portraits were developed within the BrowserQuests™ RPG? These were generated by a nifty software package called the Epic Character Generator!
As stated on the vendor's website, "With ePic Character Generator, creating professional-grade fantasy artwork has never been easier!" This was exactly why the tool was chosen to develop all the character art for BrowserQuests,™ as the program is easy and intuitive to work with and the results are fantastic! Hundreds of high-quality images have been generated by the tool in support of the RPG and we couldn't be happier with them.
Maps
While used sparingly within the game, fantasy map development requires a steep and artistic learning curve as well. Instead of trying to create nice-looking maps within a tool like Photoshop, Worldographer from Inkwell Ideas was chosen. This software tool also has a bit of a learning curve to it, but it's easier than producing maps in Photoshop (and resulting images are not directly copyrighted by the vendor, so they can be freely used within an online RPG like BrowserQuests.™)