Now it is not as fun or glamorous as working with a drawing tablet, and you're not going to get that nice organic look that tablets can give; but not everyone can afford a tablet, or they just don't draw enough to warrant the purchase of one. While it is possible to purchase some pretty cheap drawing tablets, you get what you pay for.
Why would you want to draw with a mouse? You can produce some really neat, clean, colorful pieces of work that you just cannot do with traditional media unless you're a pro. It looks great, and it's easy to modify whether you don't like the way a character's foot turned out, or you want to add accessories or change its colour pallet.
So, here's a piece of work that I did about six years ago. It may not look like much (frankly it would be polite to call it 'mediocre'), but it is a proof of concept. I know the perspective is off (the left side of the robot looks larger than the right side even though the right should be closer) amongst other issues, but that's not a problem with the mouse.
- Mouse drawn generic fighting machine
- The 5th pallet swap I tried.
I imagine there are even better artworks drawn with a mouse with this, but this was one of the first results that popped up in Google.
So the question remains, how does one draw with a mouse? Well, I used Photoshop's pen tool, and basically just created tons of coloured overlapping vectors (shapes), and I just modified the shapes with one or two other tools. Even the shadows are just different coloured shapes. I ought to have used gradient tools and the like to do more realistic shading, and I should have spent more time adding details and correcting the line work, but I got impatient: it took me 6 hours to draw that.
The person who drew the anime picture on the other hand, used a program called 'Paint Tool Sai.'
There are a lot of different techniques and software you can use, so I would recommend you Google tutorials and find one which best suits you. In hindsight, I would recommend copying art or pictures first to get the technique right. I regretted having no references for my mech while I was learning.
With all that said, I have two 'mouse drawn' art pieces that I started years ago, but never finished. I will try finish them up, and upload them some time. Maybe if I make enough, I will start a Deviant art account.
Anyway, I hope that was informative, and has inspired some of you to give digital art a try.
