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

Hey, Shivayan! This course is definitely geared towards beginner and intermediate artists. More advanced artists can still get value from some on the in-depth Photoshop knowledge and processes, but overall the course is designed so that even if you've never picked up Photoshop before you'll have a solid foundation by the end of the course. The one caveat is that the course is exclusively focused on painting, which does rely heavily on drawing. It's never too soon to start learning painting, but the stronger your drawing skills are the easier it will be to execute the assignments. I think Proko's Figure Drawing course is a great place to start if you're brand new to art, but if you've been drawing / painting for a while and just want to level up this course is made for you! In regards to the rest of the course content, we have lots more coming up. "35+ lessons" was a baseline in our initial planning, but the course has been expanding while we've developed it and the "halfway" mark is still a ways off. Once we're through this Intro to Photoshop, the rest of the course will be exclusively painting focused and will be notably longer than the Photoshop section. :)

Hey Mike! The toning was done with a Gradient Map, which we'll discuss in detail in an upcoming lesson. Feel free to experiment with it yourself, and if it's confusing you can just paint normally with reddish-brown colors as well!

We'll be talking a lot about layers in a lesson coming very shortly, followed by a full demo on using them from start to finish on a painting. For these initial exercises I'd keep it simple and use as few layers as necessary; for these my structure was basically Background (block-in), Drawing, Painting. If you're comfortable adding more and want to try feel free to test it with these exercises, and we'll be showing more and more layer techniques as the course progresses. :)

This painting is basically on one layer. We'll start adding more in future assignments and lessons, and I'll point out how and why they're used when it happens! :)

The figure drawing course is a great place to start, as good painting relies heavily on good drawing. The stronger your drawing skills, the easier it will be to follow along with the painting course. That said, the first part of this course is just to go over general principles and get some practice using your tools. We'll discuss values, theory, and process in greater depth in Parts 2 and 3!

Looks nice, could be useful for a lot of soft-edged things! Are you drawing with black or a mid-gray here? You'll want to be sure you can get a full opacity stroke out of the brush in most situations, so if you had black selected and this brush is painting 50% opacity gray you may want to fiddle with the settings.

Most of the course will be about theory and process, you can get full value out of the course with a Surface Pro and Procreate. In (some) professional contexts, you'll want a computer with decent specs as you'll be working on high resolution images with lots of layers, and the faster your computer is the more you can utilize digital tools without things getting laggy. For example, the images I do for work are 8000px wide and often end up being a gigabyte in file size; not everyone needs to work this large and complicated but it's fairly common.

You don't have to use any particular brushes to get value from the course! I haven't used Krita myself but I've heard good things from other artists; as long as you can control opacity by pen pressure and get a nice variety of textures you'll have more than enough to follow along with the lessons of the course and learn the theories it teaches. If you're comfortable with Krita, I'd recommend using it until you feel it starts hindering you (which may never happen!). If you do find that Krita isn't enough, CSP is very affordable and regularly goes on sale. Either way, you don't need the fanciest software to make great digital art: creativity and solid fundamentals are all that matters.

For this lesson I actually used the soft texture brush I made in the previous lesson, and I'll be showing different brushes for each of the assignment demos that are coming soon! :)

You can use any brush you like, and this is a good opportunity to experiment with some different brushes to find ones that you enjoy using. For this lesson I actually used the soft texture brush I made in the previous lesson, and I'll be showing different brushes for each of the assignment demos that are coming soon! :)

We plan to release some real-time demos that will show the process, and I may be able to sneak in a mini-lesson about blending as well. The process is the same as describes in the earlier video though: 1. Make sure you're using a brush with opacity controlled by pen pressure 2. Eyedrop one of the colors you want to blend 3. Lightly paint over the tone you want to blend it with 4. Eyedrop the new tone and repeat the process until smooth. It takes a bit of practice, but it won't take you long to get comfortable with the technique!

We're definitely looking into it! There will be additional demos released to go with this lesson and we should be able to include some full-length versions.

We definitely hopped right in to the painting process but don't worry! We'll be discussing a LOT of theory and fundamentals in the second part of the course. For now just try to rely on your reference and use careful observation to capture the right shapes, values, and edges in your painting. There's not a hard deadline, and I'll post feedback on as many assignments as I can, but I'd recommend trying to do each assignment within a week or two. From here on out almost every lesson will have an assignment, so finishing this lesson's assignment around when the next lesson releases will allow you to follow along over the whole course and potentially be included in the critique videos later on.