I use an old Intuos 3 tablet, which is better than a lot of new tablets because of the button cluster. It has several buttons grouped together that can be differentiated by feel along with a scroll strip. The trend with newer tablets is to have a row of buttons down the side which is not as quick or easy to press.

I used Krita this image, and most of the recent images. It is free and open source. It's good for drawing but if I need to do a complex layout with masking, lots of text, or a super smooth gradient, I'll go back to Photoshop CS 9. CS9 is old but it does not require a subscription or internet activation.

For a few of the really smooth vector animations, I used a program that I wrote myself.