Do you use pen input to control Aseprite? Does it improve your work?

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1

Hi all,

I’m shopping for my next laptop and I’m wondering if I should get one with pen input.

Do you ever ‘draw’ in Aseprite in the original sense? Does it work well? Does it help your precision or speed?

If you do use a pen, what hardware do you use, exactly?

Thanks for any reply!

2

Aseprite does not have full support for pens, so all a pen does is act as a way to move your cursor. There’s no support for pressure, tilt, or any other tablet features.

Because of this, using a stylus isn’t that useful in Aseprite. It’s faster for doodling and rough line sketches, but slower for precision work.

I use a Wacom Intuos tablet, but when I want to do loose sketches or block stuff in, I prefer to work in other software with pressure support, since then I can work more more fluidly and quickly than in Aseprite. I find it quicker to import my sketches into Aseprite than to have to change brush size manually while sketching.
For pixel art beyond the sketch phase, I don’t usually use the pen at all, I find it much more efficient to use the mouse.

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3

Thank you kindly, I appreciate the reply. I’ve never used any other software for sketching, so I might just stick to mouse and keyboard for Ase.

4

I’m pretty used to work with a tablet (wacom intuos 2 and 3). Pen input is faster for me for most pixel work. I mapped the middle and right click on the pen’s buttons so I can pan and color pick without even using any keyboard shortcut. Zooming is a bit trickier but could be mapped to express keys.
And as eishiya said, blocking and sketching with a tablet is a must. Even if Aseprite doesn’t support pressure [EDIT: it does now!], I find the simple pen input very useful even for blocking and sketching.

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5

I could not work with the mouse again after I got used to the tablet, the change greatly improves the work flow.

6

I use a tablet. I find it faster than the mouse even for single-pixel precision work.

7

I’d recommend it, even if only to give yourself a break from using a mouse all the time. Having Carpal Tunnel Syndrome will definitely impact both your speed and precision.

If this isn’t a concern I’ve always found using a mouse to be faster and more precise.

8

I use a drawing tablet with aseprite and I find that I get done in about an hour what used to take me half a day to do. It speeds up my workflow creatively a lot to be able to use a pen. Combined with time-saving features of aseprite like mirror-mode, and preview mode (f7 to bring up a preview window) which I use on my larger screen while I draw on the drawing tablet. This way I never have to copy-paste over and over again or zoom in and out to see how it looks… being able to see the 100% scale drawing on my main monitor while drawing on the tablet in real-time is so much better than using a mouse.