WARNING: Long post ahead:
Back when I was a teenager I used to draw on paper with pencil and pens. I wasn't super good at it, but I managed. One of my favourite drawings is this deer - it is the only one of my drawings that I ever framed and put on the wall:
For the purposes of this thread, though, I will use this image as an example because I redid it so many times in different formats. The pencil version is below:
Then I got my first real computer. It was a Fujitech Jumbo 8088 screaming along at 6MHZ, with 512kb of RAM and a 20MB hard drive. Naturally, I tried drawing on it. The computer was black & white, so the pic is too:
After that I got a computer that could do COLOUR! A 286-12MHZ with 1MB of RAM and a VGA card capable of showing 16 colours at 640x480 resolution! This was before Windows was really a thing (I had Windows 1.0/286 but it was useless with so little memory). The paint program I used was called ZSoft Paintbrush, and it was bundled with a mouse driver. With that one I drew this, which is the album cover for Judas Priest's Screaming For vengeance record. This was a serious undertaking: With only 16 colours to choose from I had to draw it pixel by pixel to blend for different shades:
Then I got one that could do LOTS of colours (386SX25, 4MB RAM, SVGA video). With that I decided to do my knight again:
For programs I used MS Paint (in both Win 3.11 and 95) and Jasc Paint Shop Pro. I did not have a styus or graphic tablet - these were all drawn with a mouse.
I didn't totally forsake my pencils & paper though.
Then I stopped drawing for a really, really long time. I don't know why I stopped, but back in the mid 1990's I simply put my stuff away and never drew again, except for drawing the occasional building plan... until last year. The urge to create had been getting stronger and stronger, and I finally made my mind up to start again, but exclusively on a computer (I have carpal tunnel syndrome and my hands are too unsteady to draw on paper now - it's much easier to correct quivering ink when it's digital).
So I dived right in, head first, and this is where my original question comes in: What do you use to create?
I bought myself a Microsoft Surface Pro 8 with a stylus and googled "Good art programs". I tried a few out and settled on Krita for the bulk of my drawing, but I still rely on Paint.net and even good ol' Windows Paint to do some image manipulation, simply because I am so familiar with those programs. And let me tell you all, it has been a learning curve.
The top row represents my first drawing with the new tablet (and my first drawing in 25 years or so). I was unhappy with the results, to say the least. The lower row is the same characters, but this time with a little effort put into it:
I have since attacked Krita and all it has to offer with a voracious appetite. I've learned to use layers, different brushes for different effects like lighting and shading, textures, and all sorts of goodness. Compare this early drawing:
...with this later one:
and this one, which was my first real experiment with lighting effects (I am wearing glow sticks on my ears in this pic):
and then with this most recent one, in which I went nuts with the textures (most of which will be lost as the image is reduced for this forum):
In short, I've come a long way in a short time. Less than a year has passed since that first dreadful character drawing to this one. But I am finding myself dissatisfied with Krita. I can get it do do what I want now that I've learned it, but I also find that it has been unstable lately. It crashes a lot, and when it crashes after I've just spent an hour laying textures it is everything I can do to not wing that Surface Pro at the wall.
So what are you all using?
