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.
Welcome to the forums!
Pen control will get better after practice. Changing paper to screen can be hard.
Environment sketches look really nice!
Welcome! Those landscapes are nice!
Welcome aboard, cool stuff!
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.
Hey there, can’t even give you a proper like as apparently I’ve exceeded my daily limit 🙃
Anyhow that’s a really cool study. I think the changed results could be from jpeg artifacts, either save as higher quality or save as png and see if that’s what caused the issue. For diagonals, if using a brush, you can use the same brush, change to another color or background color and paint out the part you want to wliminate. Otherwise, a super easy way is using lasso tool and clicking on points to make shapes then filling in them. For speckles you can make or search for a “speckle brush” if you need some speed
Cheers
I was going to point out that you can create your own speckle brush from an image of a few speckles, but snakker already pointed that out (I need to read better).
Day 3 of pen control practice. I'm feeling better on the lines, but the circles are still crap.
Question regarding that: Do you usually try and keep the rest of your hand from touching the screen when drawing digitally, or do you let it sit there and sort of anchor you?
Another landscape study. I tried to do this one with only the one color, plus black and white. I can definitely see some Jpeg artifacts coming through that I guess I missed.
I don't like this one as much as my previous ones, but I completed it, and I'm moving on.
And wait...is .png usually better quality than jpg for exporting? I thought it was the other way around (I exported this one on the highest quality jpg)
Hey there, PNG is definitely better quality (lossless flat) whereas JPEG is lossy (compression artefacts)
I love that otherworldly landscape! I think using different shades of white to grey would help convey more depth to the globes in the background, nice job!
As for anchoring, I do in fact place my hand on the surface and let it slide on my hypothenar eminence wearing a drawing glove and when on the go, well no glove 
When I go for fine details I anchor onto the surface or the edge and hold the stylus closer to the tip (closer to the action means more control) and when drawing expressive broad strokes I change my grip - haven't completely decided on holding in classic draughtsman grip as I don't see much point to it in digital honestly but I grip much looser and sometimes from farther back the body of the stylus depending on the kind of stroke I'm going for. Basically experimenting. As for the origin of the strokes, I do make it a point to prop up my surface and use my shoulder as much as possible for art, wrist and elbow only when rendering and detailing
cheers
Thank you so much!
I actually had my "training" via Mission Rennaissance where you start out with a big pencil and a nice huge pad of paper, holding your pencil so that you can't really do much wrist movement with it and it's all in the shoulder. I still try to take the spirit of those techniques when applicable, but yeah I agree--doesn't really work with digital art as often.
Just realized when doing my pen control for today that I forgot to do the dividing lines yesterday. So I did it twice today.
I'm definitely noticing that when I go for stronger strokes I get straighter lines, and that with circles, when just going for a circular chape in the general size of the outline rather than trying to follow the line exactly, I usually get better line and shape quality.
I think I'm seeing some slight improvement, so I'm definitely encouraged!
I started the image manipulation, but can't remember how to just select and manipulate the different parts of a single layer on their own, so I'm rewatching the tutorial to try and get a handle on that. Might need to bleed that into the weekend though.
Day 3
Day 4
