What is the "correct" way to do this? Are you supposed to sketch out the lineart with your tablet, clean it up, and then color + shade it with your mouse (as I've seen in a couple of tutorials)? Or should you just manually place the pixels with your mouse and pray that the final shape comes out right?

I'm asking this because I've been doing the latter, and I simply can't make it look right. It ends up disproportionate and weird because of my bad pixel placement. Should I just bust out my tablet and use it for the outlines instead?

My pixel art is only for sprites and tiny forum emotes, if that matters.