Creating art work and file conversion

I’m pretty new to this. Just cut my first custom art work yesterday on X-Carve 1000. It was really just scribbling in Easel but its a start. What softwares do people use to:

Interface with the machine: Easel others?

I am interested in converting a .jpg to a file format that the machine can read, do I trace it in some software?

Easel appears to be extremely basic, really just capable of free draw and that’s about it… am I missing something?

try inkscape

Easel can import a photo, and perform an Image Trace.

Experiment with that.