I can say digital painting Krita is a clear dominent leader. Affinity Designer is not fun to paint with, but its vector tools are far superior to Krita.

So my wife and I have both ourselves painting and sketching in Krita, but then making the vector in Affinity Designer. I have not used Affinity Photo so I do not know if it paints as intuitively as Krita. I have created several vector art pieces in krita and its doable so theres that.

I can do pixel art in any of these. But when doing classic pixel stuff ASESPRITE and PISKEL are my favorites.

But my wife is starting to go down the pixel tutorial hole. Wanting to move from comic art to pixel art. Many afternoons we are watching the tutorials together.

One I guy I really love I dont know if I would say he is a pixel artist. He creates his pieces in cad and vector then pixelizes the lines. Looks top notch and impressive - but I dont know if that is pixel art as it is actualy a cad file. Even still I can do his method and on those tools from my carpentry shop so I make make my buildings that way. On the other hand in charcters I can produce characters fast with piskel. Aseprite I own but have not make anything with it. Save a viking longhouse with animated torches. I did not like the results, But I enjoyed the software. Doing pixel in Krita is like overkill.

For pixel art, Pro Motion NG is pretty cool. It's inspired by the classic Deluxe Paint and has been around for a long time. It's got indexed palettes, animation, tile maps, iso grids, etc. I'm not good at art though, so I don't know if it's actually that good to use for larger works, but I did buy it.

krita is my only drawing program. without krita might have to use gimp.

Not big into 2d, but I use Krita and Gimp. Gimp mostly to change formats, size, or touch something up. For pixel art I paint in higher resolution, then go to gimp, scale it down and turn the interpolation to none. If I had to do 2d animation I would probably try Blender bones. Haven't used it for 2d though. Blender's grease pencil looks interesting also, but I haven't tried it yet. I don't really care to do animation without bones. Too hard.

@newmodels said: without krita might have to use gimp.

The horror.

@fire7side said: Not big into 2d, but I use Krita and Gimp. Gimp mostly to change formats, size, or touch something up. For pixel art I paint in higher resolution, then go to gimp, scale it down and turn the interpolation to none. If I had to do 2d animation I would probably try Blender bones. Haven't used it for 2d though. Blender's grease pencil looks interesting also, but I haven't tried it yet. I don't really care to do animation without bones. Too hard.

lots of good 2d bone animation software- some free. Some like Creature are not free but offer a lot of "motors" that help make animations fast and easy.