I did my first computer graphics using
Deluxe Paint IV on the Amiga computer. I did animations in 32 colors and images in halfbrite mode, which was 32 colors +32 "shadow versions" of those 32 colors using some sort of Amiga hardware trick.
As I moved to Linux from Amiga (Windows was never an option), GIMP was the program that was available. GIMP 1.x something was really not very good so I reverted back to the Amiga for several years, doing most of my artwork with pencils and charchoal instead. It was not until GIMP 2.0 that the program really started to shape up for me and I moved over to using it exclusively. Around that time I also bought my first graphical digitizer, the Wacom Graphire, which really allowed me to move my entire workflow to the computer. I've not felt the need to go back to analogue art tools since.
I have done a lot of tutorials and images exploring how to use it for digital artwork rather than photo/filter manipulation (in this I was pretty early I think). I used GIMP exclusively up until late version 2.6 or so. GIMP used my images as linux-screenshots on their website for almost a decade.
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
When the GIMP developers made it clear that their goal was not from-scratch image creation but primarily photo-editing, it felt clear that the limited brush tools available to GIMP at the time (they were subsequently improved) were not the priority and I found MyPaint, a program specifically made for painting but with no processing tools (not even a crop tool initially). I switched to using MyPaint for painting and used GIMP for post-processing, and did so for many years.
These days Krita has arisen as the all-encompassing tool for handling all this for me - not only does it embed the MyPaint brush engine (but I think GIMP does too now, no?), it is
built for digital, from-scratch painting - the whole workflow. So these days I only use GIMP very rarely when I need to do some quick editing.