Developing your artistic skills is your #1 priority on the road to becoming a full time artist. The difference between someone with little skills and amazing skills is the difference between and amateur, hobbyist and a professional, full time artist. There are 2 important things to realize about skills, first they are never perfect, so you need to practice them everyday.
To some extent being and artist is very similar to being and athlete. An athlete needs to practice everyday or his performance will fall apart. Another example would be a musician, who also needs to practice every day or his performance will fall off quickly.
Practice includes study and drilling. There is a lot of technical know how involved in the arts and a professional really needs to know his stuff. But just knowing is not enough, one needs to be able to “do it perfectly!” and that takes a lot of drilling and practice.
Having a good instructor or coach is helpful to crack the whip on you and keep you focused everyday.
Here are some resources I like. There are 100s of these resources and I have not looked into all of them so I can’t say these are the best, but these are the ones I like.
Knowing your technology and being able to do it will perfectly is vital.