I do a lot of my own, and I use graph paper and colored pencils, or once in awhile, the Paint program on my computer.
Right now I'm working on a baby quilt with hot air balloons. The balloons are pieced, my own design. Easy to draft on graph paper, the pain is adding seam allowances. The other pain has been the arrangement of the balloons on the background. So I made some "to scale" drawings on post-it notes and have been moving them around the graph paper, trying to figure out the best composition.