Hi Charles! Welcome

I was the same, to the point of giving up on using it till really recently. It's quite simple actually, you already posted on the "Art School" tab, which has everyone who bought the "Art School" program. On this same thread, you keep replying on it to post your progress or any questions you would have (anything you would like to post really).
And then to keep up with what other people are posting, I personally keep the tab open so that I don't lose it and then whenever people are posting new stuff I check it out and try to help if it's within my knowledge or just to learn from their practices..

it's really cool, I really recommend you share your progress here, people are super helpful and knowledgeable. And just in general it's nice to have an art community

Let me know if you need me to make a recording of where to find the forum and how to use it (What I wrote might be more confusing, I am known to do that )

np!! glad to be of help

You need to observe things around you. Not just look at them but observe. Think what shapes they are built from, how light affects them, how colors look in certain settings. For example take bottle you will notice that it is a cylinder or two. You can do it everywhere and you will built your visual library

Hope it helps! If not I will try to explain it better

optional but you can also start a daily observation journal and write down stuff that you observed about the object itself, the lighting on the object, reflections, shadows, etc

A daily observation journal? I like this idea and now I have to think about this topic.

np here are some examples:

7/1/22

Keyboard backlight - noticed that although the backlight emanated light, it was not so bright that the whole thing was glowing, the light followed perspective rules as in if you could only see the bottom, right and left sides and not the top edge, the glow followed the same rules and i was not able to see the glow on the top side of the keys. each key had its own perspective.

Screen Light on quilt
the quilt looked like a mixture of round/soft shapes and cube/hard shapes. the lighting followed similarly as if it was a round or hard shaped object depending on the folds.

7/2/22

When you pass my something what you see of it is not just one side but like 2 other sides that u pass by. its almost like if you turned a sphere or a cube as you walk/drive past it.

7/3/22

The terminator appears to usually be a color that is darker than the color of the object that has the terminator - ie skin terminator is dark orange if the skin is the typical skin color. the purple samsung earbud case has a dark purple terminator because the case itself is purple.

7/4/22

Reflective light can come from more than one source. if there is one on the left and one on the right there will be a reflection spot on the right and the left of the object if it is reflective. if its not reflective, the lighting kind of blends/melts into the object's color

7/5/22

Skin is kind of like clothes for the bones lol. if you move a certain way that stretches your skin you can see it sort of get thinner like if you ball up your fists you can see the knuckles more clearly and thats basically the bones underneath stretching it. very interesting...

7/6/22

Scifi buildings combine soft and hard elements. they can be based off of a cube or rectangle but have certain parts that are more round and abstract shaped. When round, the windows simply follow the curve of the building.

Question.. how do they know where to put windows and where not to put windows? what is the ratio of window to building?

for futuristic buildings the ratio seems to be 50% window, 50% frame/building. think of it like glasses. Glasses without frames look like buildings without windows, there are the space there for windows and if windows are not put in they look like lens-less glasses with just the skeleton of a frame.

To make a building unique you would probably need to design what the FRAME looks like rather than what the windows look like - ie its the placement of said windows and the contrast of the windows vs the frame of the building that makes it look nice.

7/8/22

Everything has "negative space"; the "cutout" look. noticing that will be helpful.
The negative space basically supports the positive space ie the item you are seeing.

7/9/22

a mall is not a singular building. its a bunch of buildings mashed together therefore its not a singular size or shape most of the time. each building has a different height, width, architecture that makes the mashed up building look unique so its not just a block

7/10/22

shadows are the color of the surrounding objects, if a green thing had a blue thing next to it that the light shines onto and it reflects blue and that reflection is in the area of the green object, the shadow will also have a tint of blue.

7/16/22

How do hard and soft shadows come about? hard shadows come about when one thing (with a relatively hard edge) is directly blocking something else thus cutting off the light to that spot rather than just the object being further away from the light which is where soft light comes in.

eyy glad it helps i did that a while ago so good thing i was able to find and copy n paste it

btw thats a nice profile pic! did u draw that?

I've never thought to do it like that.. Usually, I just make mental notes, but it makes more sense to write down what you observe.. Thanks for the idea!

noice! ur pfp looks rly good

keep up the good work with time those lines will get smoother!