[alice]

you know, there are free alternatives to illustrator, photoshop and indesign. Most popular photoshop ones are paint.net and gimp. Paint.net is probably a little bit cleaner and easier to use than GIMP. Inkscape is the only one I know that substitutes for illustrator. Never used it myself.

IMO your best bet is paint.net. a vector program like illustrator and indesign are meant for generating digital content that doesn't suffer from resolution issues like raster content does. But since your just printing on 8.5x11 (as opposed to say printing 8.5x11 feet billboards) resolution really isn't an issue so a raster program like paint.net should be fine.

btw, in case you don't know, raster = pixels, like a .bmp file, vector = mathematical equations to store visual information and therefore doesn't suffer resolution issues like raster does.