this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
16 points (90.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

45287 readers
887 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm guessing a lot of people are going to say Illustrator or Inkscape. Are there any raster art programs?

top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Most are mouse first programs. Developers know that a majority do not own a pen tablet or something similar. There's a reason why brushes in programs have smoothing, so that you can get nice curves even with a mouse.

Moreover, I would call GIMP's experience with pen tablet relatively worse than using a mouse.

The reason why pen tablets are better in most cases is that you can use real drawing skills within those programs, like pressure and tilt, which cannot be achieved by a mouse.

[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 2 points 21 hours ago

I think they're asking for which ones have the best/most of those 'smoothing' and similar features. Not if they exist.

I would chime in with a recommend but I'm not intimately familiar with any art app except Blender, and even there it's mostly modeling and not 'art'.

[–] Wren@lemmy.today 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I found Krita easy to use with a mouse, they might still have a free trial going on - that's what hooked me.

I know you said raster, but what about working in vector and converting to raster? I found Affinity programs pretty streamlined and affordable for moving back and forth between styles.

[–] cecilkorik@piefed.ca 6 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Krita is always free and open source, supported by donations and the community. It's not a trial and it's not time-limited.

[–] Wren@lemmy.today 1 points 19 hours ago

Thanks for the correction. It looks like buying through a platform/app store supports the developers. At that time (years ago) I got into it through a trial. I didn't know it was free, but glad I supported them.

[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Your restriction to raster only apps makes little sense to me, outside of art style choices (which is totally valid).

Most of the features I can think of that would make using a mouse easier I would think would be more likely to be present in vector art programs? Or something with excellent bezier curve controls and tilt/pressure emulation controls in similar fashion, anyways.

You may have to give a bit more info on what you're looking for to get really good suggestions. For starters, do you only really want to draw with the mouse like it's a stylus but not end up with nasty lines? Or do you just want tools you can adjust and won't have to be precise with and fiddle with to infinity to get the shapes you want?

Many programs have multiple different supported workflows to make certain construction styles easier, too, so which app is best might directly come down to what you want to do and how you want to do it more than mouse vs stylus or raster vs vector, etc.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Or do you just want tools you can adjust and won’t have to be precise with and fiddle with to infinity to get the shapes you want?

That's kind of what I'm thinking of.

[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 1 points 16 hours ago

In that case, I'd definitely not disregard vector based apps. Worst case, you 'should' be able to do the heavy lifting in what ever app is best for that control scheme, and maybe do some extra work in a rasterized tool if your style truly requires non-vectorized details.

If you want a lot of your detail to be from traditional methods, it might be easiest to stay in a rasterized app, but if you want the line work or sketching/etc tools to be nice computational tools you can change at will regardless, it might take exploring a few options in order to expose the 'best' tool.

[–] Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 17 hours ago

Autodesk sketchbook works pretty well when using a mouse.

[–] LordMayor@piefed.social 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Mouse users? As opposed to what? Stylus users? Touch?

Any software that can be used with a mouse can be used with stylus or touch. Any raster art program made for a personal computer will have mouse support.

It’s not clear what you’re even asking.

[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 1 points 21 hours ago

I think they're asking for a traditional raster art program that still comes with nice features for mouse drawing, like curve smoothing and ... uh... other things.