Help me become a Professional Artist

[will123will]

Hey thanks a lot for the sketchbook visit :). Your doing really well so far, especially love the sketchbook pro studies, I tried doing some stuff on that and failed badly haha :). Regarding your question on time, it tends to vary a lot but I generally like to aim for about 2 hours or less on a study but that really does depend on a lot of variables as different things can take longer to paint. Shading wise, I try (emphasis on try) to block in the biggest, most obvious value changes right away, then when I feel they are accurate I start to work on the smaller, less obvious ones. A way to make this easier is to squint, because the light gets diffused in your eyelashes and makes texture less obvious so you can just focus on the overall impression of light. Best book I've read on this is Richard Schmidts (hope I didn't get that wrong) Alla Prima, Everything I Know About Painting.
Hope that helped haha and keep up the awesome work :). Oh and also, try and make sure you are understanding how stuff is working from a physics point of view, like how the light is reacting with the material, it will help a ton with imagination stuff :).

Will