Drawing App: Mischief Desktop
Painting App: Sketchbook Pro Desktop
Finishing App: Photoshop CS6
Everything done directly on my SP3.
I highly recommend Mischief if you like line art/drawing. The vector line work it produces is superb and my go-to drawing app for that reason. For simple line drawings, there really is nothing better purely because of the vector. The issue is it eats a lot of power and requires a lot of ram. I have 4GB ram on my SP3 and a full page line drawing will get it to run out of memory. Shouldn't be an issue if you have an 8GB model.
Sketchbook pro is faster and lighter than PS and it performs very well. The working file above was painted in 6000x4000 px @150 DPI and generated a 250MB PSD file. Sketchbook Pro handled it with almost no problems. I would recommend upgrading to the pro version if you do a lot of painting and need a light program. It's not quite as advanced as photoshop (specifically you'll miss out the very useful warp tools from PS) but it's a very good paint program.
