{{pending: decide scale(s) to draw images on. I am leaning towards 3x scale}}

All art must be done with the Ultima 7 palette, or as close to it as possible. Ideally, the palette that the Gimp shape plug-in generates should be used, as it uses unique entries for all colors. In particular, the last 32 colors are critical, because they are used for palette cycling and/or semi-transparency in Ultima 7, and some of them are duplicates of earlier colors. You do not have to work with a paletted image (for example, if you want to use gradient tools), but you should ensure that it can be converted to the Ultima 7 palette without loss (or with tolerable dithering). Also, any color conversion should not use the last 32 colors for anything but palette animations or semi-transparent portions. {{link to Gimp shape plug-in, and to a generated palette file}}

Alpha channels should not be used for the borders, but they can be used at intermediate steps -- if the resulting colors can be converted without loss to the Ultima 7 palette. Likewise, all borders should be manually anti-aliased so that they look good in high-contrast backgrounds. The lack of alpha channels mean that little to no anti-aliasing should be done. Most objects should have a thin black border around them to match the Ultima 7 style; contrary to most other cases, the width of this border should not be scaled from the original games, and should remain 1 pixel wide.

The Ultima 7 "perspective" should be used for all images; it is detailed below. While the image itself need not be done directly in the Ultima 7 perspective, it should be possible to perform the conversion simply and without many complications (and with minimal loss, particularly when converting to the Ultima 7 palette). As of now, there are Gimp scripts available that map flat surfaces (a face of a box, drawn head-on) into a top, side or frontal face of the same box seen into the Ultima 7 "perspective" for the selected side. Another script combines 3 such layers into the full composite box if the layers are "compatible". Finally, there is also a script that flips the image, performing a Ultima 7-style "rotation". {{todo: link to scripts, and perhaps to expanded explanation and documentation}}

Another imperative is that the art should look like it could be downscaled to the original Ultima 7 image. Watch for the "weasel words": if it happens that downscaling the image results in the original Ultima 7 image, this is an added bonus; but images should not be designed for this purpose as this would mean an unneccessary restriction which could result in loss of detail.

Likewise, the graphics should be based on the original images, but not directly upscaled images: we want to add details and improve the look of the game, not manually perform a job better suited to scalers. Upscaling the images and using it to base proportions and basic colors is permissible; upscaling and smoothing (manually or otherwise) to avoid pixelation is not. Upscaling and manually editing to add details is a gray area: in some (many?) cases, it would probably be easier to start from scratch, while the legal minefield makes the other cases undesirable. In summary, upscaling should only be used for proportions and basic colors.