Stop looking at art tutorials and pick up an art book
I understand the appeal of tutorials. You want to learn something in a quick and easily accessible manner, have someone break it down step by step how they do something.
However, my problem with art tutorials since their inception but exarcebated with youtube, tiktok, instagram, etc. is how much that "accessibility" is in reality watering down and removing the nuance of the topic, repeating the same basic terminology and concepts and refusing to look deeper into things. How many times have you seen a color theory tutorial talk about the same terms (analogous, triad, pick contrasting colors, 60-30-10 rule) and come back feeling like you learned nothing new? Or a shading tutorial that went on about light source, what colors to use, etc.
This is why I'm telling you, the person reading this, that you need to let go of the art tutorial and start reading art books. Because the reason all this advice is the same is because they're all repeating from artists who learned from artists who learned from artists who learned from those books, and in the jump from interpretation to interpretation, actual explanations on why things happen and why certain phenomenons exists have been replaced by "do this" and "do that" and "don't do this".
Interested in that so called loomis method? Read loomis' books where he pioneers it. Curious on how colors and light work in a canvas? Most of that is sourced from James Gurney's Light and Color.
These books can look daunting, but you will learn a lot more by accepting their size and long explanations as they are, to go into the science of why things work this way, instead of looking at tutorials removed from their context and presented as random factoids.
And if you really want to look at something as its made, which I believe is the main appeal of art tutorials in video form, seek out speedpaints (not timelapses) and ask for recordings instead of tutorials from your favorite artist. See how they piece things together and try to understand why theyre doing what they do.
All of this. Ya know that satan peice i recently did? I dug out my copy of color and light to get that right without it looking like a neon hellscape. The composision work i did just use the hermit tarot card as a base but got some help out of Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis. And just to add to this, copy some paintings you like. Do a master study from time to time and see where you go.
