Term 1 - Sam

Hello, I'm Sam. I just turned 30 last month. and have been drawing for quite a bit chunk of that time, even though I don't really have that much of a formal education.
I have been an art teacher at private studios teaching children for over eight years now so I do have some basic fundamentals, but I'm at that point where I can only go so far without constructive critique and better fundamentals so I jumped on this deal when I saw it.

My posts will generally be long-winded as I will put in all my thought processes and revelations along with my assignments to help me digest the assignments.
Hope to make some friends here.

I don't own photoshop, but I have Clip Studio Paint that was gifted to me by a close friend some years ago, so that is what I'll be using.

1. I have practiced drawing straight lines and ellipses with pencil and paper but somehow never thought to do it with my computer. The first thing I noticed was that I have a lot less control and accuracy with the stylus.
   My tablet is an intuos 3 and the nib of my stylus is a little wobbly so I have to exert pressure to draw.
   Another reason was due to the fact that I was looking at the screen and drawing on another surface. I also try to lock my wrist and pull the stylus with my elbow and shoulder like with traditional drawing, but that just kinda made the wobbling worse.
   My hand also stuck to the tablet surface when I exerted pressure and tried to pull unlike with paper. This took many, many undos before I actually had lines that I was semi-satisfied with.

2. For this one I decided to rotate the canvas and draw from left to right instead, and the tilt of the stylus in this angle allowed me to be a lot more stable with my lines. I still had to press pretty hard for it to work though, therefore the little wisps at the end that's just too much work to erase.
   I had to make sure I was sitting in a good posture and use my elbow to ensure that my lines are straight. Usually my lines are better from top to bottom traditionally, but it seems like it's the opposite digitally.

3. It was generally smooth-sailing for this section. I only really had to go 3-4 tries per circle to kinda mostly get it. Again, this assignment is much easier on paper and I noticed that the right side of my circles are more wobbly as I really had to draw with my wrist to maintain accuracy instead of using my elbow and shoulder.

4. I used the flat marker from CSP to do these lines as they were the closest brush I found. These were not very difficult, but it still took a few tries to make the transition of the gradient to be as smooth as I liked. In hindsight, they can be much darker towards the end.

I have to admit that I totally cheated with the first one. I used a colour picker to see how close I am with the colours and tried to match it. Most took more than one try but there were one or two that I was lucky with. The last one was the most iffy to get right. I couldn't get the saturation to match as close as I'd like, eh, oh well.

Thanks @chad-25-philander! I noticed there's a few people in their thirties here haha. Good luck with yours too!

Combining Images:
Honestly, this was very tedious without photoshop. I had refused to buy it after they started the subscription model and it was fine since I had a CS5 on my old desktop.

Here's the before and after:

Yeah, the alpacas bothered me a little and you described it perfectly. If it's not too much trouble, do you have any tips on how to fix it? I don't really understand the part about focus and pixel density.

Ooo boy, these took way longer than it should. I had to manually splice some of the apples together and tried to keep the highlights and shadows of the new apples consistent to the ones in the background. I also did my best to place the new apples in places that would mostly make sense. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me @PeterH ! It was simple and well explained and I learnt a lot from it. I'll keep in mind pixel density from now on when I combine images and now I noticed I could have handled the details a bit better regarding this with the rest of the image. I didn't keep the working file, so I only reworked the alpacas, but already it looks so much better! So thanks again!

It seems like once a week is the most time I can commit to classes without burning out. At the same time I'm also a little concerned that I might be progressing way too slowly compared to the schedule that Marc recommended, eh. I'll still do my best though.

Old to young was much easier to do than young to old. I had to lasso, copy paste and soft erase the edges a lot. I remembered that our noses droop as we age, so I made sure to resize both noses to make them younger/older.

This one was so time consuming to make! I had to frankenstein her together since I don't have liquefy. I'm not too satisfied with the mouth and she looks hella creepy, but I did as best as I could and I think it turned out sooomewhat okay.