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.

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

Thank you!

I'm definitely aware of the overshoot. I've noticed at this point if I don't overshoot, I tend to swerve when trying to stop and don't make a straight line, so that's something that is definitely going to be a more gradual process.

Pen Control W1D5.

Yesterday got away from me, so I didn't do the exercise, but I did 2 today. I noticed that the skinnier lines (even by 1 pixel) made me fee like I had a bit less control.

W1D6

I noticed that doing 2 exercises in a row made me a bit more confident on the second one.

Is there a setting that I need to adjust to get flow variation instead of opacity or flow/opacity? So far I'm only able to get flow and opacity, or only opacity variation.

W1 Assignment 2:

I somewhat messed up on this one, as for all but the first pair of circles, I modified circle B instead of circle A. It worked on most of them, though. Uploading this, I now see on some of them I wasn't as accurate as I thought, but it looks like I was pretty close. I think I did a decent job with levels editing, but curves seemed a lot less intuitive. The Color Balance was very intuitive. The bottom one, though, do we get any more practice images like that, or can you recommend any other tutorials with practice rounds like this? Is it worth just messing with all the settings on a bunch of images, putting them in a folder after exporting, and then later trying out this exercise?

I feel like I've already learned more in this first week than I have in the past year of trying to figure things out as I go. Excited for the rest of the course!