Well Ron, I'm pretty far from being any kind of artist myself, except mayeb a bad one.
The only tip I can really give you is this. For most of my screens I sketched down what I wanted the screen to look like on paper first, and then used PICEDIT to try to reproduce my idea. Then I colored it and slapped it into the game.
Creating screens is very tricky, and can be rather tough. A few of my screens I used teh trace option in PICEDIT, pulling in a picture converted to PCX format at a certain size. Then traced over it in PICEDIT. It actually works remarkably well.
Basically it's trial an error. But if all else fails, you can try the trace option. Start looking through books, comics books, whatever, and find stuff you might want to use, scan it, convert it to PCX and pull it into PICEDIT and create your screen.
Sorry I can't be more help.
Vonster