Thank goodness it is close to Christmas, as this is the time of year to recieve some great gifts, with one coming to us from Kore Nordmann.  He wrote a series of articles (great reads, check the links below) for Image Creation with PHP, they will teach you about Bitmaps, Vector Graphics, Libraries and Image Formats, and tools for image creation.

The Image Creation with PHP are broken up into several posts, here is a direct link to all the topics.

Format and Libraries

A first shape

Gradient rendering

Integrating bitmaps

Text rendering

Image Tools