I don't doubt that you want an answer from the exceedingly talented artist, and not from the artistically-vacant lost-causes that loiter under the endless font of nice pictures, but if you will excuse a bit of incompetent pedantry, please allow me to share a few thoughts...
A lot of professional computer artists use a touchscreen and a special stick to fake having a pencil and paper. Using a mouse is a different skill to using a pencil, and will likely take a similar amount of time to become competent with. It is also a bit less agile and convenient. Dots will be awkward, it will tend to obstruct rulers and even if you manage to use one the mouse can change orientation and mess up your straight line... Actually the orientation shifts will be all over you... people have successfully done truly astounding art with nothing but a mouse, but don't expect to just instantly make good art with one, it'll take getting used to.
Computers offer a lot of tools however. From the laziness of copypasting to the glorious undo button(doubly glorious when undoing removals as opposed to additions), select and move, rotate... Along with all manner of lines that can be pulled around after being placed... There is a reason why "collage" has largely been replaced by "shopped"(although I have no idea why both "shop" and "ship" are euphemisms...), combining bits and pieces of different images is a field in which mice excel! And then you get more direct tools like those demonstrated in
this terror(which I found in
this forum that I found by searching: best art "done with a mouse". My search-fu is weak...) which include fancy tools you won't see in basic paint such as "a transparent brush" and "a selection that isn't square" and "changing the shade of a region"...
Spo yes, gettign to know tools can be good. And getting creative with tools is also good, even something dead-simple like an oval or circle drawing tool can be centred in the image to make a round head, or centre outside of the image to make, say, and inward curve on a nose, or made massively huge to produce a very mild curve that can be copy-pasted to make a mildly-curved forehead. And the undo-delete options are also your friend. You can just spam line after line after line all day and if you don't like them exactly where they are, then spam a boatload of new lines all over because it still isn't quite right...
Also consider multiple versions of the same image. You can do one stick-figure with circle and line tools to quickly get a hint of proportions. Then do another image with classical line-spam to get something more evocative than a bunch of lines and shapes. Even Paint will let you copy one picture over the top of another with a transparent background colour to compare your proportions from a stick-figure to a sketch. Then you can save your line-spam image and start doing heavy lines or whatever, and then copy/paste the final thing onto a background image that you prepared earlier...
However, ultimately, my advise would be as follows: Start with something very simple, like a straight-line tool, and make a ridiculously simple mockup of the elements involved. Then just start spamming and deleting lines where they vaguely seem appropriate until eventually you start accruing a few that actually ARE appropriate and a comprehensible image starts to emerge from the depths. And then accept that it isn't as good as you wanted, and go do another, and another, and another, because ultimately, drawing with a computer is a new skill and there is nothing for it except to grind out the skill levels like a hauler on a screw-pump... It is just like all those martial arts movies say "before you can learn The Three-fingered Decapitation Palm, you must master the basics. Go punch some laundry!"...
P.S.
Hail Satan! May the ignorant be spared the horrors of Adobe's ink crucibles...
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Topic: Losing Is Fun - The Interactive Comic (Read 378205 times)