I use an iPad with Adobe Sketch and my finger for all my art. How about you guys?

Paper and pencil.

I rather like charcoal for most of my drawings and ink for cartoons and cartoon pornography.

paint tool sai, photoshop (sometimes) and whatever this wacom tablet is that i got from school

I do my work on a laptop with a mouse, the programs I use are MS Paint for the lineart and PictBear for the coloring, background, and shading.

Paint.net, pixlr for touch ups, and a Huion 580 tablet

Basically everything that is moderately convenient.

Traditional art:
2h, hb, 2b, 6b pencils. Similar in lead-holder format. Charcoal. Crayon and oil pastels. 0.9 or 0.7 hb technical pencil. Biro and Gel pen.

Digital art:
Monoprice 12", GIMP (with GIMP-GAP and GMIC), Krita, MyPaint, Inkscape, Grafx2, Aseprite, running on Arch Linux w/ QTile WM.

Often looking to expand. I think sticking to the same tools gets you in a rut where your tools start dictating your artistic choices instead of your artistic choices dictating your use of tools.

EDIT: Whoops, missed some:

TA: Scanner, permanent markers of various kinds; 0.1 / 0.2 Technical pens. Occasionally color pencils.
DA: Blender. Heavily customized version of sxiv. al.chemy.

If we're going for format, allow me to steal Savage's:

Transitional Art

• Mechanical 0.7mm Pencil and Printer Paper

Digital Art:

• Wacom Intuos Pen Small, Krita on Xubuntu 16.04 (16.10 is too buggy for my tastes)

Fear it's self is my primary tool. Art fears me so much it pops into existence in worries it will anger me for having to put effort into it.

Really though, blender for 3d stuff, inkscape and geany for vectors, gimp for rasters.

Paint, Infranview, and Paintshop Pro mainly.

There are also different texture format tools.

WinPVR, The Compressonator 1.50, among others.

Traditional: alcohol markers, india ink, watercolor, pencil, charcoal, dry pastel

Digital: Paint Tool SAI, rarely Photoshop, Wacom Bamboo Create tablet

My laptop is a 5-6 year old refurbished stock ASUS U52F. You don't need to piss away grands for equipment. Programs and computers don't make up for lack of skill.

I actually want to learn how to art on a computer, with a mouse and etc.; whenever I try, however, it ends up relatively shitty. I already know the things I'm missing, like accenting blacks and whites with greys, field of depth, etc...

If anyone is skilled with drawing on a PC, could you give me some pointers? I use GIMP as of now, but I do have access to non-paid programs.

No. 2 Pencil and Paper, Scanner, Paint Tool SAI and Paint.NET.

Usually in that order.

Siral_Exan said:
I actually want to learn how to art on a computer, with a mouse and etc.; whenever I try, however, it ends up relatively shitty.

Using a mouse as primary input device is a real problem. Graphics Tablet is a must, unless you're only doing pixel art.

Putting that aside, you really need to show examples and point out specifically where you see problems, to get useful critique.

Otherwise, we can only give generic advice like, 'make sure you work at a higher resolution than the final pic will be', and 'pick a set of a few brushes to work with, ignore the rest for time being'.

savageorange said:
Using a mouse as primary input device is a real problem. Graphics Tablet is a must, unless you're only doing pixel art.

This is one of the reasons I use SAI. I have to use a mouse because 1) I have a body tremor that I've had since I was a child that's worse in the extremities, and 2) in order to maintain control of a pencil or pen I have to hold it really hard. This works fairly well for a pencil but not for a graphics tablet stylus. Thankfully SAI has an anchoring tool which you can use for lineart, that allows you to make nice smooth lines and is intuitive enough to figure it out on your own. I've tried finding another program with that particular feature, and what I've found has either not had that feature, or has had a variation of it that was more difficult than I need it to be to figure it out.

But that said, if SAI didn't exist I'd probably be opting for either a tablet myself, or I'd still be doing traditional artwork.

Maybe I should respecify: shitty-er, than what I use as a base. If the description "this is Homestuck sprite art" doesn't suffice, then I don't think I can convey what I mean. Homestuck art sprite art is always shitty.

The base bodies I use always use have fading black to greys for their body lines and makes it look smoother, whereas I need to get rid of those lest my transparent background make any color other than white, show the fading colors instead of smoother lines. I have to use solid black... but that is my specific problem; I know I have some very basic concepts down, but nowhere near enough. I can probably do color edits, mostly because of all the colors I've sampled and everything I've seen colors on, but I can't do full on creations, nor line art.

So, general advice would probably be appreciated, from people who specifically (know how to) use a PC to draw.

Drawing on PC? It's just like drawing with any other medium, pretty much.
You may feel that's unhelpful, but it's literally true.. things like Layers, Undo, and Zoom are just useful refinements.

Doing edits is kind of a different area. EDIT: Drawing skills obviously help, but edits are far more about technical skills than drawing is.

If you were looking for techniques to make those edits, I guess you could use the Select By Color tool and choose channels 'Saturation'. Makes it easy to select all grey pixels at once; Then you can use Quick Mask mode (see Select menu or click dashed icon in lower left corner of GIMP window) to remove any pixels that shouldn't be affected. QMask mode lets you paint the selection with normal painting tools -- Bucket Fill with Sample Merged enabled is particularly relevant here. Exit quick mask mode, and finally fill the selected pixels with black.

(This is going off what I remember, that Homestuck stuff is aliased (ie. the colors are not blended into each other. Other techniques, like bilateral smoothing (via GMIC, which has a nice GIMP plugin) apply if this is not the case).

EDIT:
If I've come across unnecessarily harsh, I apologize. To clarify:

• I encounter a 'techniques/technology are what I need' mindset a lot, and comprehensively disagree with it. That's what my initial comment was directed at: Drawing remains the same mental process, the means are secondary.

• In case there is some misunderstanding about 'PC' versus 'tablet': This isn't a 'versus' situation; a graphics tablet is an input peripheral -for- PCs and Macs, not to be confused with the much better known term tablet (which I am sure you know, is basically a glorified smartphone.)

• Just to cover all my bases, Linux also == PC, generally. If you disagree, then "Windows" is probably what you actually meant.

• People still can't answer your question very specifically without actual sample images, IMO; that's why I've answered fairly casually. What technique works best for editing is fairly context-dependent and can require a lot of tuning ..

• so you can describe your situation in text, but it would take a lot more text and a lot more careful wording than you've used thus far. "Picture is worth a thousand words" really applies here.

Just gonna leave this here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_3D_computer_graphics_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_raster_graphics_editors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_vector_graphics_editors

Digital: Photoshop CC 2015, using a Huion H610 Pro drawing tablet on a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop.

Saving up for a high end Microsoft Surface Book i7 1TB 16GB RAM with Performance Base model, which'll set me back about $3,000.

I just can't become friends with a tablet for some reason, so I use a mouse, MSPaint 98 and Clip Studio Paint.

GameManiac said:
Digital: Photoshop CC 2015, using a Huion H610 Pro drawing tablet on a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop.

Saving up for a high end Microsoft Surface Book i7 1TB 16GB RAM with Performance Base model, which'll set me back about $3,000.

Why... Microsoft will be the death of us!

But seriously. $3000 for an oversized tablet? You can create art on my computer (HP Slimline 7600 with an 2.6Ghz AMD64 processor, 2.5 GB of DDR2 RAM and a 240 GB Solid State Drive). Why pay for a tablet that has more than you need to do art if that's all you'll be using it for?

Faux-Pa said:
Why... Microsoft will be the death of us!

But seriously. $3000 for an oversized tablet? You can create art on my computer (HP Slimline 7600 with an 2.6Ghz AMD64 processor, 2.5 GB of DDR2 RAM and a 240 GB Solid State Drive). Why pay for a tablet that has more than you need to do art if that's all you'll be using it for?

I believe your confusing Microsoft with Apple. :P

Seriously though, I had my eyes set on the Surface Book since last year. Nothing else comes close, especially in terms of versatility and power for something so small.

It may be expensive, but I can afford it. And if not, PayPal can cover half of it and I can pay back the loan without interest if I do so in under six months.

When I ask people what program they use respond to me: "photoshop", but for me it is a bit too expensive. I bought a license recently the "Paint Tool Sai" and it was my mistake. I sent the money but not sent licenses. For a time I used Kirta but is no easy to me to create a clean line art.
After rehearsals I found MediBang Pro is a free program and is just friendly as Sai.

GIMP and Inkscape. GIMP is basically a free, non-DRM version of Photoshop.

I do most of my arts on my IPad Pro. Recently I bought a XP-PEN Deco 03 graphic art tablet for laptop . Both are good although I still need some time to get used to the XP-PEN .
Applications that I use:
iPad: procreate and comic draw
Laptop: Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint.

quite a necropost you've submitted there …
however i've got some things to say so i'm going to ride it,

i spent a fair bit of time with Scribus for typesetting,
it seems to have a pretty powerful set of features for text effects, precise adjustments, etc., and the UI was reasonable.
however it had one annoying flaw — text outlines often produced ugly spikes protruding from the letters, and I couldn't find any good workarounds. this was about 3 years ago, maybe they've improved the feature since then.

i moved to Inkscape for typesetting, which does not have the outlines problem.
overall inkscape's text features are definitely weaker, but most things could still be achieved one way or another.
the UI is a little unintuitive in various ways; it didn't take me too long to become acquainted with it. understanding XML and CSS is helpful in that regard.

for painting, I dropped paint.net pretty quickly because the brush engine had terrible spacing at certain brush sizes, where it looked like you were drawing a centipede rather than a line. this was many years ago, maybe it's been improved since. i also remember that layers can't be locked
i still use it for editing directdraw textures (.dds files) — seems to work quite well for this purpose.

i tried GIMP a few times but couldn't tolerate that rightclick opens the context-menu and can't be configured differently.

for me, Krita is the winner for painting and editing purposes. the controls are highly customisable. the tools seem to be thoughtfully designed in a generic fashion, especially the very flexible brush engine. the UI is good, not too many quirks, again highly customisable. the animation-frames feature (as of approx. one year ago) seemed rudimentary but still useful.
main drawbacks are:
• performance — not as well optimised compared to some of the others; may struggle with huge canvases, lots filter/mask layers, etc.
• some of the more advanced tools (particularly warp/distortion tools) are less powerful/useful than the photoshop equivalents.
• the text tool was severely broken last time i tried to use it, though it may have improved by now.

i tried Photoshop and Sai; both simply didn't allow enough customisation of the controls and i couldn't get used them. however from what i've seen they're pretty solid in terms of performance, so if i had to work on weak hardware i may give them more consideration. may be worth keeping Photoshop around for the occasional times when Krita isn't up to the task.

honestly i'm not really an artist, just a hack; mostly editing, creating diagrams, documentation etc.
nonetheless i hope my findings may be of use to someone evaluating the options.

Does anyone here have a separate machine for their artwork?

I use Paper, Pencil, Marker, Watercolor_(artwork)....(( I'd rather come here to find out what useful digital tools are available for me. ))

leon_neon said:
Does anyone here have a separate machine for their artwork?

In my case, I bought iPad(Pro10.5) and Apple_Pencil for the purpose of creating artwork. 　 ← Well, now it's active in playing music and translating on the go, though.🙄　 I also have Wacom-Intuos, but it seems devices without a screen are not a good match for me.

So far, it's graphite pencil, colored pencil, ballpen, and watercolor.

For digital, I mostly use Photoshop on desktop and Autodesk Sketchbook on tablet.

thehuskyk9 said:
Paint.net, pixlr for touch ups, and a Huion 580 tablet

Update
For drawings: Paint.NET, Paint Tool SAI, sometimes Photoshop
For animations: Paint.NET & After Effects
Hardware: Huion GT-190 (thinking about upgrading to a Huion Kamvas 20 or Pro 16)

I pretty much only do digital these days
I use Krita for software, Huion H610 Pro pen tablet for hardware
When I do traditional, it's typically just done with a mechanical pencil and sketchpad

I'm still nervous to upload anything on here, so I'm waiting to do so
(Edit: This is actually my first forum post!)