3:52 AM, Tuesday June 9th 2020
Hello! It's is not at all necessary for you to do DaB in ink just highly recommended. It's only necessary for patreons who get official critiques. Ballpens are also pretty good btw, if in case you want to use them. In fact for lesson 6 onwards their use is actually encouraged. Also you don't need anything fancy for paper. I've used the back of old test papers, old letters, school print-outs, and the back of the papers from my calender for the exercises.
The main reason I encouraged you to switch to ink is that when you go to discord, I thought that people won't be willing to critique your work in the lesson channels. Since I saw someone a while a back who did one of the lessons in digital get told off by some people in the lesson channels to post their work on #art-share instead. I was worried that you might not get any critique even if you posted your work on Discord. And feedback/critique is really important. Once you get it you can practice on your warm-ups knowing you aren't repeating mistakes. Checked again though and yeah you can definitely still get feedback again just with a lower chance though.
Regarding pen pressure. Fineliners or felt tips pens, which are the pens recommended for Lesson 1-5, can give you a variety of line weights depending on how slow or fast you draw, and with how much pressure you put into it. I recommended you use a pen with pen pressure as this is what I saw people in the Discord who did DaB digitally do to better mimic a fineliner pen. Here's an example. Additionally you can see in the video demos that Uncomfortable uses a brush that mimics a fineliner pen. The line thickness isn't even all throughout. It's very subtle but it's there.
Join the Discord btw! The community is nice! I only joined around 4 weeks ago and I've learned so much just by.. existing there hehe
I didn't mark your lesson off as complete because I initially intended for my comment to be taken more of us general feedback rather than an actual critique. I'm sorry, now that I think about it, it is silly that I didn't mark your lesson as complete, seeing as to how you did your best to follow the instructions, and since I approached your submission much like an actual critique. I'm not a teaching assistant btw or anything just a regular dude who's also doing DaB.
Anyway goodluck!!! If your only choice is to do digital then do it!! YOU HAVE MY 100% FULL SUPPORT!!!!!!! Coz in the end what matters most when it comes to leveling up your art skills is the amount of time and effort, and focused practice and study you put in, rather than the medium that you're using. I did some digging and found that there's a few people who did DaB digitally. In the subreddit if you search up the user CrapDepot, he did DaB and he's doing amazing work right now.
Oh yeah one last thing, since you're doing digital I recommend you check out Ctrl+Paint.