Hey, Peter! IMO, it does and it doesn't matter. "What brush do you use?" is almost a meme at this point, but brushes do make a difference- and I think it mainly comes down to experimentation and feeling. Like some artists prefer charcoal pencils, others prefer charcoal sticks, neither is better but one may just feel better for you and you'll get more out of it. Generally speaking, you won't develop bad habits from using the wrong brush. Bad habits just come from process, cutting corners, using shortcuts instead of learning fundamentals, etc. I think focusing on specifics like what brush, what size/opacity, etc. isn't super important. What's more helpful is to set a goal and experiment with brushes to get there. Like if you want to get better at more painterly styles, do some painting studies and try out some textural brushes to see what you can do. If you want to get better at hyper rendered splash art style, you can try a study with just hard/soft round brushes and see if you can nail that hyper-render feeling. So my general advice would be: - Set some goals on what kind of markmaking you're trying to achieve - Get some free/paid brushes from artists that will help you get there, or make your own - Try out your new brushes and organize them. Keep the ones you like, delete the ones you don't like. Having a massive, disorganized brush library is a nightmare. - Learn your software's brush engine. Being able to make your own brushes helps a lot, and it will help you understand why some brushes work for you and others don't. And you can even edit brushes that "almost" work for you to make them perfect.

You can definitely use CSP! The first section of the course is focused a lot on tools, presented in Photoshop, but CSP has pretty much all the same tools and it should translate relatively well. :)

Hey Tsotne! Thanks for keeping up with all the assignments, it's been great following your work. :D Don't worry, it will get easier! The most likely culprit is that you're simply more experienced with figures than backgrounds, so you're hitting a bit of a wall where you know you can paint "better" than this, but it's not coming together the way you want for the background which can be frustrating. As with everything: practice, study, and reference is the key! Additionally, backgrounds are very reliant on perspective so investing some time into learning that can help a lot. This is also a very challenging assignment, we've been working almost entirely with reference up to this point, but if you invented the background from imagination that's a whole new problem to tackle. Did you have reference for this background or was it purely invented? I'll get deeper into this on the critique video, but for now I hope this helps. Keep it up, you're doing all the right things! :)

Thanks, Tsotne! Appreciate you following along with the course, now that we've laid the foundation with all the Photoshop knowledge the coming lessons are gonna get really fun and dig into a lot more painting. :D