Things that are missing for me to have found this helpful:
- how to get a teacher
- anecdotes about how having a teacher affected your life
- why a teacher I found at the pub is better than a udacity course
Posted a job description – initially setup by asking gpt4 to help write it down, then grammarly to make it solid; setup interviews with a bunch of people; got on a call with a handful; chose one whit whom I'm working with once or twice a week.
Did it because YT tutorials were not helping, because there are a lot of them(hot topic), from many different people, with quickly outdated material, and un-interesting or annoying people(too many memes, jokes, or segways).
Now I have someone I pay to get on a call a few times per week, we go over the assignments, I ask questions, they tell me what to look out for and how to do it better.
I have accepted to pay per hour a bit above what I make on my fulltime job.
Curious how the online material compares
I don't see this on YT as much and there are subjects, mainly front end JS frameworks, that are frequently changing. So much so that I often run into backwards breaking changes and have to resort to the comments section for corrections.
I sense that youtube is happy with users wasting away looking for the right video tutorial.
I always wanted to paint portraits - I can draw people relatively well, but they never look like the people I'm actually portraying. And my drawings are very 2-dimensional, which is a conscious style choice that nonetheless doesn't lend itself well to real-life portraits.
I started following Bob Ross and, while I did get some okay paintings out of it, the end result was never what I intended. My brush simply didn't move the way his does and as a result my trees didn't look very happy. I next signed up for a popular online platform that's primarily focused on art lessons, but again, my exercises kept going out of control because I couldn't get the paint to behave in the same way as in the videos. And I found myself yelling at the screen several times because, say, the artist in the video would add violet to a person's skin, the end result would look very good, but at no point was there an explanation for why would you even think about adding violet to paint skin.
How did a random teacher help? Because they give me real-time feedback on what I'm doing, they warn me about mistakes before I build everything on top of them, they answer my infinite "but why?" questions, and provide useful background about how to reason my way into whatever I'm trying to achieve. No Udacity course will look at your code and say "this is fine, but this algorithm will not scale beyond 10k records and also your comments need to be more informative".
I found my current teacher looking online for well-rated teachers near me, but this has also been my experience with teachers whose online rating I truly don't know.
Look at some masters of caricature and cartooning, find photos of some of their favorite subjects, think about how these drawings exaggerate what's there in the shapes of the subject's face/body/motion. This is how you make a drawing that is simultaneously a stylized 2D rendering and one that "looks like" its subject.
Like, get some coffee table books of Hirschfeld or Sorel or someone else who did a lot of caricatures of celebrities and study the heck out of them. Copy some of their drawings with photos of the subjects close to hand. Look at a person and ask yourself what they'd do here, and draw that.
Hopefully this is something your teacher has already gotten you doing! But if they haven't, then give it a try, and see what they have to say about your attempts.