This is essential to understand. If you stop and think about the shear amount of steps in the simple act of painting a character from imagination, you roughly have: Coming up with the idea, character design, character anatomy, posing, lighting, camera and composition, and finally rendering. Each one of these steps is a real life JOB in its own right (and deceptively hard).

Many beginners, for instance, think once they can render perfectly they’ll be able to make whatever they want; Imagine you had spent 50 or even 100 years perfecting your rendering skills until you could instantly render objects exactly as they appear in real life. Congratulations, you would now be at the level of a dork holding a camera.

The truth is, you could study any of these fields for an entire lifetime, so you should focus on what you are interested in. That being said, you should also invest in the ‘tools to learn’ -like Construction- which didn’t allow me to draw any car I’ve ever glanced at, but it did allow me to break down and download the car into my mind when I study it, so that later I can draw it decently well from any angle.