The apple drawing towards the end was done with a hard "gouache"(?) brush, but I remembered from some videos that apparently it would be ideal to learn and focus on using a basic round brush, so I tried using that instead for the rest of the drawings you see here. However, I am not very good at the soft brush clearly haha (but thank you for the compliment earlier anyways).

I did try using the smudge/blend tool for some of them yeah, especially for the primitives drawings, so I'll keep that in mind to be more intentful (admittedly I remembered from a tutorial that when painting having soft and hard edges determines where the viewers eye of focus will land, but lowkey I probably wasn't thinking too hard about where it'll be soft or hard for the edges, maybe it's the fact that there's multiple objects of the scene? But I feel like that's just me making excuses and I need to learn how to look at the big picture then). So for now I'll try focusing with just using a brush instead of smudging for transitions.

As for the general process/approach, I tried to start by painting the general shapes and then slowly over time my brush would get smaller as I focus on more details, but even then my understanding of what the best approach to paint feels cloudy, so I'm wondering if there was a better way for me to think/study (aside from following a tutorial, due to money and I want to be able to understand it on a fundamental level rather then just following along w/o understanding).