>>6007217I think the best way to do focused and smart study is project based studying.
For example say you want to be an environment artist. You should have a goal of 1 finished environment painting every week. Every day you should do a bit of study towards that goal, like composition thumbnails, copying screenshots from films with good filmography, copying good photography of interesting environments around the world, value studies, color studies, some more finished, bigger thumbnails and then decided on one of them to make into the final painting.
Then do some call outs where you pick props and paint them detailed under certain lighting conditions to practice your refined, finished painting skills without actually doing an entire painting yet and to decided to amount of detail you want to use for the finished painting.
Then start the finished painting, using the composition, value, color thumbnails and prop studies you already did as a guide, along with plenty of reference. You should basically know exactly what is going into the finished piece at this point.
You come out of 1 week with a finished painting and a ton of supporting thumbnails and mini studies. Exactly what you would be doing if you were working as an environment artist anyway.
