Tips on good drawing / animation programs

Aseprite on PC or Mac for pixel graphics. Has animation and layers, tiles and every thing pixel artists really need. Please login to see this link.

Affinity Designer on Mac, Ipad and PC. For vector and raster art. You can even blend both together in one art file. This one works great with ipad and apple pencil. Please login to see this link.

Procreate for Ipad Please login to see this link.

Aseprite is definitely the most popular tool for making animated pixel art these days (in spite of the ugly GUI) - but it's not a general purpose graphics app. GraphicsGale used to be pretty popular with pixel artists too, back in the day. And there's Cosmigo Pro Motion, which claims some high profile users (Ubi soft, Gameloft) - I wasn't impressed last time I tried it, but maybe it's been improved since...

Personally, I've been a big fan of Paintshop Pro since the mid '90s (currently using version X9). For static pixel art, it's the best there is (especially in terms of the interface, which is lightyears ahead of Photoshop or GIMP) - BUT it lacks any real animation features.

The other one that seems like it might be worth a look is Krita. It's really meant for digital painting, so it might take a bit of effort to get it set up for pixel art, but it does have the right tools hidden away, as well as what appear to be quite powerful animation features. My old laptop isn't fast enough to run it smoothly though.

I use Photoshop, but it might not be optimal for pixel art really.

I saw that there was a program on Steam that looked really good on sale for 50% right now called Pro Motion NG: Please login to see this link.

Just to give an example of how my sprites looks in my upcoming title Plantera 2: Golden Acorn: Please login to see this link.

I also have to throw my hat in for Aseprite. It's quite cheap, well supported and works great

Cartoon Animator: Please login to see this link.

Moho: Please login to see this link.

In these two programs, you design everything, including the animations, then export it as a .png sequence and import it into Fusion.

I agree on Asperite and Paint Shop Pro. I have used Paint Shop Pro 8 for MANY years. Recently bought the Corel 2021 version of Paint Shop Pro from a Humble Bundle, and learned that most features and even the menus had not changed much in decades. They added a bunch of plugins and add-ons with piecemeal innovation and shove ads in your face constantly, so uninstalled and was disappointed. Fired back up version 8.

You might also check out these free or low cost options:

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Please login to see this link. (the guy founded Tsugi Audio Tools for making sound FX, awesome tools too!) - pretty neat to make music from your images!

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The good old standby MS Paint

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Quote from Xhadoe

I have used Paint Shop Pro 8 for MANY years. Recently bought the Corel 2021 version of Paint Shop Pro from a Humble Bundle, and learned that most features and even the menus had not changed much in decades. They added a bunch of plugins and add-ons with piecemeal innovation and shove ads in your face constantly, so uninstalled and was disappointed. Fired back up version 8.

That's odd. I've never seen any ads at all, so I bet there's a way to turn them off.
I agree that the latest versions are not much of an upgrade - I'd still be perfectly happy using version 9.0 (the final JASC version before it was bought by Corel), but I never managed to get it to run in Windows 10. Animation is the only thing missing. The dark theme is very nice though...

Quote from burresnurre

I have always used Fusion 2.5s own drawing/animation programs, does anyone have tips on something that works better?

Just about any tool we can suggest will probably work better, since it'll have been made by a team that's dedicated its energies to making a graphics tool. Whereas Clickteam are a small team who are too busy working on their terrific game engine to be able to also make a terrific graphics editing tool. It's not the central part of their program, nor should it be. Which tool will work best for you will depend less on the tool and more on what your needs are: pixelart vs smooth graphics, power vs easy to learn, professional vs free, etc.

I personally use Photoshop for graphics and Toon Boom Harmony for animation. Both are near the top of the pile in terms of power and flexibility - there's almost nothing they can't do - but they're also expensive and relatively complicated.

I switched from Paint Shop Pro to Photoshop 20 years ago and haven't looked back - Photoshop's versatility impressed me back then, and they've made many improvements since then, to the point that almost none of the tools and workflows I now use daily in Photoshop even existed 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago. As others have mentioned though, it's a poor choice for pixelart, if that's your thing.

Toon Boom Harmony is incredibly powerful animation software with some wonderfully intuitive vector tools that work brilliantly with a wacom pen. It's really impressive, but really expensive. I think Toon Boom have some cheaper options (Toon Boom Studio was good, but not sure if they still make that). Spriter may be a good option too, and has some tighter integration with Fusion via an extension that you buy on the click store.