Spencer - Art School Journey

Hi everyone!
This is to help keep me on track with assignments and my own desire to just do daily sketches. I'm going to try and make sure I post on here regularly, and I might have a few questions, so any help would be appreciated!

Hey Everyone! This is W1D1 of pen control for me. I think this is going to be the most challenging part for me, as I don't have the steadiest hands. Something about the pen/screen combo also just seems a bit less tactile than pencil/paper combo, so that might be influencing things a bit.
I would highly appreciate any advice on that and any feedback for this assignment!

This is one of my sketches from last week, following a youtube tutorial. I'm trying to focus more on landscapes for right now and figuring out brushes and getting comfortable with just using photoshop/digital art tools, as well as getting comfortable with mistakes, so I'm trying to just do one or two passes, then move on to the next one.

Another landscape youtube tutorial sketch. I'm a bit happier with this one, and this was actually pre-tutorial, just trying to mimic what the artist did in his sketch as he was speaking.

This one was a study that makes me think I need to fix some resolution settings or something, as the edges of the blue and red parts were a lot cleaner on the psd. file and even on the jpg when looking at it afterward.

I was trying to just do 4-5 colors on each, and then mess with the opacity of the layers when needed, trying to just do a quick study, not hone in on the details, and move on.

This was mainly an experiment in layering and clipping masks as far as the technical aspect. I tried to use that to get the nice clean borders, but you can probably see with the blue/red border, that didn't go as well, because rather than clipping everything to the foundation of the blue layer, I wanted to clip a few things to the planet shape, and so couldn't clip that edge of the planet to the little triangle area I had made. Any advice for that and getting clean-cut diagonal lines?

My other main questions regarding this would be about how the upper and lower edges of the red/blue seem to fade into a different black, but it didn't appear that way when I was working with it.

Also, for the effect with all the little embers in the red part of the piece, is there a way to do that more efficiently rather than just making a bunch of little dots/swipes all over the canvas?

Would also love any general feedback.

This is my pen control assignment for today.

For straight lines, I found that if I turn the canvas/screen so that I'm drawing horizontal lines, they come out straight much more often. Is that a handicap? Or should I lean into that?

Circles are nowhere near what I would like, but I found having the canvas flat and sideways instead of tilted for those worked a lot better.

For the bottom part...any recommendations for a brush that recognizes pressure for flow but not opacity? Couldn't find any brushes that did just one but not the other.