I understand that a lot of Features on Krita rely on somebody having a tablet to draw with, but then there’s people like me who can’t afford one.
Tell me, what’s the best advice you can give me to draw something with a mouse? What kind of methods do you use to be just as good as if you’re using a pen?
I think @RamonM has made the crayons bundle to be useable with a mouse.
Have you considered buying a small, no-display, non-wacom tablet ? You can get very professional and comfortable material for around 100$ with Huion for example.
Yep…and I got an XP-Pen Deco 01 V2 for like $50 used/returned from amazon …
There’s only so much you can do with a mouse due to its limited binary input. Krita has no mouse painting support that emulates something like pressure. Other software is suited better for this. Painting or drawing with a mouse can be done but it takes a lot of additional effort for tweaking every stroke if you want something like varying thickness or transparency in a line. Using vectors can help a lot because its not too close to traditional drawing, easier to do with a mouse. But vectors are not a strength of Krita and the tools are limited.
I think something could be theoretically achieved in a future version of Krita with a plug-in, like automated curves, or a pressure tool that allows you set the thickness of your lines at specific points or something similar, as demonstrated here:
I’ve never received a carpal tunnel in my life.
I don’t spend that many hours drawing things, and that is the primary reason why I’m asking if there’s tricks to speed up the process in any way.
If your only advise is to just buy a cheap drawing tablet, or something, than that’s fine too.
While drawing with a mouse can be done with training, I did it when I transitioned to digital (about 15 years ago) the precision and speed was simply outmatched by the pen tablet (back then I had to really save up money but it was worth it) and most of the muscle memory from traditional drawing carried over (so no relearning for that at least). Nowadays you can get good tablets for 50-100 USD already. Basically the price of two video games.
Krita has no features to really speed up mouse drawing, not that I’m aware of. Depending on the style you want, you are always faster with a pen (in Krita) if it has at least pressure sensitivity, because then you can often do in one strokes what otherwise would take more with a mouse or you need specialized brush presets optimized for a mouse workflow. The difference depends on the style of course.
My first illustration when I downloaded Krita back in 2016 (Spider-Man fanart) I didn’t have a tablet at the time so it was drawn all by mouse. As everyone here mentioned, I would still reccommend getting a cheap non-display tablet, I got mine not long after for about 60$, later I upgraded to a XP-pen display tablet.
It is difficult, but you definitely can still make great looking art with just a mouse, but it takes a lot more work and a lot more time. But hey, if you can make beautiful art with just a mouse, you deserve extra bragging rights! 
Definitely. I’ve seen some really good artwork made with a mouse, it’s mostly done in clip studio paint or how it’s called. I remember it has really good mouse painting support, they do it by applying a kind of post processing after every stroke.
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