DuelisticNature - Art School Journey (Current - Term 1)

Another one coming through! Hello fellow aspiring artists!

Introduction I feel is in order: I'm a 30 year old Dutchy working currently as an Optometrist in an eye healthcare clinic. Armed with a love for learning new things, getting good at them and a super power in observation (how fitting for an optometrist) I intend to dig into this school program tooth nail and claw!

Recently I dug through my old stuff finding doodles of my 16 year old self and realizing it was something I used to enjoy doing. This rekindled my love for making fan art and reconnecting to the franchise that sparked it all even going so far as to want to set a long term goal for myself. Being able to write and draw my own comic books in 5 years time.

Having no education of the sort in the art of drawing or anything creative I started 2 to 3 months ago on Skillshare going through a 7 week course of Artist Brent Evistan to get the fundamentals of traditional drawings down and the progress was invigorating to see. However digital art is a beast all on its own which has led me to Marc Brunet's Art School program.

That's about enough of an introduction I feel, time to get busy! Unfortunately, as probably anyone working in a medical field knows, spare time is super rare to come by and energy/ motivation to do fun things after work even less so. We'll see how my progress goes.

Feedback is always welcome! We're all here to learn on our creative journeys!

Ok starting out I have ZERO experience in the use of digital software and the use of a display tablet, luckily I get handy with tools quickly the moment I use them a couple times.

Dug my teeth into the first two assignments of the Photoshop for digital production 1 assignments and sort of face a challenge in using CSP (Clips Studio Paint) instead of Photoshop. Given my daily job in the medical field and later goal, the monthly subscription basis of Photoshop didn't appeal to me.
That does come with translation issues given CSP has quite similar tools to Photoshop, but stuck in a different spot having to sort those out as well.

Couple of funny things to note:
- Tracing the circles I got into the habit of pantomiming my circle before drawing as I learned in my skillshare courses, but the feel is unnatural to me for now on Pen Display tablet so some are fluid round circles and others are actively traced.
- I had to create 2 custom brushes right out the gate to get the last assignment down because CSP doesn't have quick menu buttons to turn off opacity/ brush size linked to pen pressure. Those are stuck INSIDE the individual brush setting themselves.
- Does anyone know how to adjust CSP brushes to start off with an even finer taper? I used 70px round brush for it, but no matter how light i press it always starts off that thick.

This one was fun to do, especially matching the colors, however I got stuck on the grey scale image for 3 hours straight before throwing in the towel...
bit of a perfectionist I am...

The last one... well... magic what Marc has done I swear... and unfortunately even with extra tutorials on how to work with Tone/ levels/ color balance I can't seem to get the reddish hue specifically on Mei's arms and white contrast on ONLY the umbrella.

And we're back. With some good and some bad I'd like to have your guys' opinion on.

I'm doing this to improve my skills as a hobby, I have no ambition to become a professional photo editor and assignment 3 and 4 delve even deeper into photo manipulation.

In CSP I've noticed it is quite limited and to be frank, Now if you used CSP, what did you do? tackle the challenge as best you could or skip it?

For now I've decided to skip it and figured to do something more motivating and took on Marc's 30 day improvement challenge he posted on Youtube. Below are the results.

I've had fun doing these, good dexterity practices if you're absolutely new to using a digital tablet as well. And in general I don't settle for the minimum of practice, I have a tendency to do more just so my muscle memory builds faster.

Feedback is always welcome!