Do you have a favorite art program?
 

I've only ever used two so I don't know if I have that good of a reference point TBH.

I just researched a few seconds and saw photoshop is an industry standard and was like yup dats the I want.

The other I used to be Corel Draw, I wasn't very good at it, but in the end that didn't matter.

FireAlpaca is open source and really user-friendly! it has a lot fewer controls than Krita, and the interface is set up a bit more minimalistically, so it's better to start with imho.

i mostly use Photoshop myself though. it sucks that it's so expensive and there's no way to pirate it anymore, but it really is the best for pixel art and graphic design, and it can mimic MS Paint really well.

I used to love the classic MS Paint!

My go to is Paint Tool SAI! SAI1 was perfect for my needs when I was laptop bound. Now I upgraded to 2. Unfortunately all the brushes and stuff are gone so I'm not as enthused to paint/color. I just wanna draw! Why do I have to mess with the settings. D:

I'm thinking about getting Clip Studio, but I should learn Photoshop..

I use Photoshop, in the recent years it went through heaps of changes that made me go ugh, but I've found everything I needed to after hours of banging on it.

GIMP is also pretty decent.

I downloaded Krita recently and haven't used it for anything other than file conversion. I'm still using gimp for all my art. And to call myself out, I just figured out how to set my files to 300ppi

oh mood, when i switched to my new computer the HD screen made all my art fuzzy and i couldn't figure why until i looked at the ppi and they were all set to like 50 [cry]

Mine were all on 70 but I had unintentionally compensated by having massive canvases. Now I have normal canvases and high ppi, saves me so much space on my hard drive lol

i love starting with massive canvasses and then resizing when i save the final version. i feel like it makes it more crisp but i still have some wiggle room with the brush size.

I do love using a larger brush size. But man can my computer not handle the large images. ����

I've been using Clip Studio Paint for a few years now (previously used Sai), and I love it. It has some excellent features, including the ability to use 3D reference layers. I think it's also set up in such a way as to make manga/comic pages more easily, though I've never really dived too far into that.

It's less for powerful than some of the other programs but I actually love using Canva to make graphics for my job! It's not as robust as Photoshop for example but it makes it super easy to make templates for social media graphics and other things!

I really love Clip Studio Paint. It's a lot easier to draw nice lines.

i've heard good things about CSP! i'm old, so i'm still shackled to Photoshop [rofl]. but it's gotten better over the years, so it's worth it now.

i used to use FireAlpaca for a while though, which is open source (free), because PS's brushes used to be terribly hideously antialiased, just so blurry it was like a broken felt pen lol, and I also couldn't figure out how to turn on smoothing [lol] But now they include a bunch of really nice free ones with the subscription, and I finally googled smoothing, so I pretty much abandoned FA.

I tried learning how to animate in Krita once, but got really overwhelmed because i'm so used to the legacy page-by-page animation in PS that these timeline things confused me. Which is weird because I actually first learned how to animate in Flash, which had the timeline setup [:?] but I'm due for a refresher. Krita in general, like SAI, just really overwhelms me with all the options, and I have trouble learning a new page setup. FA is so much more similar to PS.

You could turn that off in the old versions too but darned if I remember how. I remember Wishie walked me through it when I first started Pixel-ing. That was forever ago. Then I upgraded like 10 versions and all my stuff was like not where I left it and I nearly flipped the table (joking....mostly [lol]). I eventually figured it out again though.

exactly why i hate updates [angry] i can never find anything again! i'm old, dammit! [illgetu] [lol]

---------- Post added 01-21-2024 at 09:37 PM ----------

i like antialiased brushes, i don't just do pixel, but the ones in the old version were like a photocopy of a photocopy, it was icky

Oh yes, they are quite nice for none Pixel purposes, but it makes pixel art utterly impossible, and at the time I was doing too much pixel art to really be able to do anything else.

oh absolutely, i could never do pixel art that way, i wouldn't even know how.

I've been using fire alpaca lately, it's free and feels similar to paint tool sai, which now charges lol.