fancy self-made backgrounds for websites Options

[szostakowicz]

Hello I've been playing around with HTML&CSS recently and stumbled on quite a few websites with fancy backgrounds including one color smoothly changing into another from top to bottom, a wave dividing a page in two with one color above it and another below, backgrounds that look like sand-paper, buttons with crazy-shaped background etc etc you get the picture. While it's possible to create something like this in Microsoft Paint (by coloring single pixels all day!) or googling background images, I'm sure there there have to be some programs to create those simple (but complex by Microsoft Paint standars) graphics yourself. What program (or other solution) would you recommend?