About a week ago, I got started on my very first ship mod (preview coming soon, hopefully

I need to design custom shield, cloak and station images, and install them in superluminal. My first question:
How do I get access to stock FTL's artwork? Is it located in the resource.dat/data.dat files? If so, how do I unpack them, or is there an easier way to use them?
What would be really cool is if I design my own artwork for them, but a template is extremely helpful, as opposed to starting from scratch.
Second Question: Is there a way to create a cloak image without spending 5 days on each individual pixel (as I have creating the ship hull itself)?
Third Question: How do I create custom weapons, and would it be possible to, like, copy a stock weapon, modify its stats like a template and then save it as a new weapon?
Help is appreciated. Thanks!