Phew boy! Those were challenging! I feel like I learned a lot about general to specific, how to prioritize putting down broad colors before honing in and getting more and more specific. It's definitely a skill you have to refine. Hand in hand with that is brush size, choosing the correct brush size painting really makes a difference. It was really hard to pick the right colors by eye, especially when there are so many complicated ones right next to each other, they don't look right unless they're in context. Towards the end of each of these, I stopped picking by eye, and used the eyedropper, but pretty often that meant that I realized that ALL my colors were off! I also had a lot of trouble with blending, trying to keep the shapes (especially of cast shadows) correct while getting the correctly soft edge! The blending tools, I feel like, are hard to get a feel on, I don't know what the Q-tip in Krita is going to do a lot of the time it feels like, I just put it on something, rub and hope for the best. I also learned that making a line art and tracing the original thing really helps. When I'm in colors mode, it's really difficult to understand relative angles and proportions sometimes, and making a lineart to follow, even if it's only temporarily to get everything laid up, allows me to focus much more on the painting itself with the frustration of "THE ANGLES AND PROPORTIONS ARE TOTALLY WRONG!" Even so, there were times when my impatience got the better of me. All in all, I learned about workflow and, I feel like, how to paint wisely. But down a couple base colors first, they don't have to be super accurate, but they should represent the end colors. Don't be afraid to do some sketching first. Use layers to your advantage. Be conscious of brush size. Move around the canvas. Get up and stretch often, take breaks. Stay hydrated. exercise patience. So. So much patience.

As someone whose used Krita for a couple years now and has attempted digital painting with very little success before, a big barrier for me WAS the fact that I didn't really know what to do with all the brushes. Just knowing a few limited brushes are solid and usable and yield a painterly look is honestly a big a really valuable takeaway from this class already. Knowing what one brush's strength is allows you to realize also what its weaknesses are too and to then organically start exploring how to cover those with the other default brushes. Also, am I the only one who thinks that color Jeremy called "Purple" at the end there was more of a blue?

I actually made two attempts. My first one was trying to be a mashup of a lamprey, puffin and a planarian (a planarian is a flatworm which you can cut up into dozens of pieces and each piece can grow into a new worm. Notably, their mouth is tentacle in the middle of their body). I was uh, disappointed with that one, so I tried again today! My new attempt is a porpoise + Glaucus atlanticus and I feel like it turned out kind of cool! I really wanted to give it countershading, so I gave it some color. :)

I feel like I learned alot about picking the right values. I was often surprised when my values were off, so I'm glad I checked every now and then with the color picker. With the circle and cube one, I struggled more with values than the other two. I decided it was probably time to move on to the next lesson instead of perfecting things though.

No color picker except a bit for the red ball, because I was tired and wanted to be done. My main issue is knowing when to stop. I at first am having too much fun painting so I don’t want to stop, I put too much energy and focus then, and have nothing left to finish what I planned to do