Topic: What art materials, hardware and software do you use?

I thought this would be an interesting subject to talk about for those who draw here. So, as the title suggests, I'd like to know what art materials, hardware and software do you guys use to draw your art. Hardware may include the display you use if you're a desktop user.

You may include where you got most of your artistic inspiration from and/or a quick run-down of your drawing process (ex. sketch, scan, then photoshop) if you feel like throwing that out as well.

Since I'm the one who started this, my setup consists of the following:

- Genius EasyPen i405X tablet (not so great for drawing directly but its good enough for vector plotting and manipulating).
- Mitsubishi RDF223H 21" CRT monitor (running it at 1792x1344 75Hz, color contrast looks great on it though).
- Inkscape (for general art).
- Aseprite (for pixel-art, usually SFW stuff).
- Blender (for 3D modelling and rendering, I only make SFW stuff on it).

Majority of my artistic inspiration initially came from Sheep in the Big City and Phineas and Ferb but it had since been replaced by influences from artists I followed on dA (one example is the anthro axolotl design of my Natalie character). There might be other shows that influenced me as well but I can't recall them at the moment.

I used to draw by sketching on paper (sometimes tracing paper when working on multi-layer pieces) with a mechanical pencil and then scanning it into my computer for cleanup and coloring using Inkscape, by overlaying vector strokes over the scanned sketch.

Ever since I got my tablet however, I soon went all digital to the point that I forgot how to draw on paper again (sort of). My current process consists of plotting plain vector strokes that would make up the image I wanted to draw and then converting it into filled strokes so I can manipulate it to make it look like variable-width strokes. The results tend to look like as if the drawing was made in Illustrator.

Updated by Ratte