What is your guys prefered program of choice for 2D Art? Is Illustrator, Photoshop, Gimp, Inkscape etc. I am about to start learning 2D art converting over from my programming background and becoming a "jack of all trades". Do most people when making an animation cycle just put the previous frame in another layer so they can still see it?

I was also thinking about making a few different "humanoid" body stuctures, and then applying textures to it, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel!

Kinda depends on what kind of art you're doing, some things will be better than others.

For 2D animating, you can get by with something like Photoshop (although its expensive and not necessarily built for this, but I've seen people set up a pretty good onion-skinning workflow using actions). Spine on the other hand is excellent and built for this, others like Aseprite or PyxelEdit are worth a look too. If you're after something along the lines of photoshop then I'd highly recommend Krita, it can do loads of the things I use Photoshop for daily at work, but is free/cheap and similar interface.

If you're at all familiar with 3D, then depending on your art style, it can be worth considering chopping up the 2D assets to rig and render frames to use in sprite sheets. I've been able to use this pretty effectively in game jams but it does have its own technical challenges/downsides.

I mostly use Aseprite (for pixel art) and Inkscape (for vector art). I don't do a lot of digital painting, but when I do I use Krita.

@mangorosi Just a hobbyist (doing art to keep sanity while making software).

For 2D:

• GIMP for format/image base manipulation (I've spent way too much time in Linux and on GTK+ to never switch over to anything else - plus python and plugins make it a lot easier for me to use it)
• Substance Designer (or Substance Stack) - for node based texture generation (and partially baking)
• Blender (to some extent for 2D too)
• Inkscape (for vector-based graphics)
• Spine (used it for animation - and it's quite great, was harder to integrate, but they are getting better … didn't touch it for about 2 years though)
• … and many custom tools, most of which were made by me for me (that includes way to perform various image manipulation, analysis, etc.) - their names are irrelevant, because no one outside of members of my company has ever used them

I still haven't extensively used any AI generators for images (just touched it) - to some extent they can generate useful data, but the quality often varies heavily.