"Literally, it means that Bob is everything you can think of, but not dead; i.e., Bob is a purple-spotted, yellow-striped bumblebee/dragon/pterodactyl hybrid with a voracious addiction to Twix candy bars, but not dead."- kSquared
There is a great libary Devil (Developers image libary) at http://openil.sourceforge.net/ it makes image loading and modifying pretty easy. Besides it''s open source so you can sneak in the code.