Hey Thomas! Personally, I would not set goals like 'be a full time artist in two years.' This puts enormous pressure on yourself to move forwards quickly. If you are feeling overwhelmed already, do you feel confident you'll be ok when you have commissions to do in a tight deadline, especially if you perhaps feel you haven't 'got there' yet? I would break it down into more concrete goals, for instance: pick an artist you admire or some pieces of quality you want to achieve, then copy them. If you can recreate that quality, move on. Next, can you create five pieces of that quality in a month/fortnight/week? Then maybe, set a goal to sell a piece or do a commission, even if to family or friends. See how that experience goes and set yourself a time limit to deliver to. As you want to be freelance, how are your salesman skills? How well do you think you can negotiate? Can you manage your business affairs (i.e. taxes, website, royalties, etc)? Have you entered any local art shows? That's a great way to engage the art community and get your work out there. You don't need to be a pro to do that, just put it out there and you never know. It's awesome that you have passionate goals to be an artist, but don't set yourself up for stress and anxiety by forcing artificial and broad deadlines. First and foremost you have to enjoy what you do ;) In terms of fundamentals and deficits, it depends on what you're creating. As you like portraits, try some that are more challenging then you're used to and you'll find out what you need to focus on. Don't worry too much about learning it all if it's not relevant to the things you like creating (i.e. you need a different understanding of composition for portraits than landscapes). They can come later or as you know you'll definitely need them, rather than trying to master everything for the sake of it. Hope that helps! I had a look at your albums, they're really good quality and you capture expressions well :)

I would recoment to restrict yourselt to the basics. Don't overwhelm yourself with too many topics. I would discard the colour, tones, Textures and photoshop points. To get good at drawing I think the basics like composition (including gesture), perspective as well as contrast/dark and lights are much more important to a drawing. Many artists tend to jump right into colour theory, but what makes a drawing look good are the values. And I would practice my weak basics. E.g. you said that you are "okay" with light and shadow so I would recomend to get a toned paper, one white and one black pencil. Get a regerence and just draw the higtlights and darks to get a good eye for the contrast. Go really dark and really light with the tones. Don't focus on detail, just the overall impression of lights and darks. (btw this is a very fun exercise :D) Also I wouldn't jump from one topic to another. Than it's going to be overwhelming. Rather learn one area and take what you learnet to the next step :) I learned much more from my graphite drawings than from any I drew with colour. Because this has given me a much more better understanding for the value I need to get. Hope I could help.

Hey Thomas, totally understandable to be a bit overwhelmed with the amount there is to learn. That list will probably be ever changing and ever growing as you become a better artist. Which is GOOD because that means you are aware of your weaknesses and know what you have to improve. Personally I think you should do art that you find joy in and focus on a style or content that lets you focus on one or two of the areas you want to improve. For example, your an engineer, so drawing machines, or architecture might be an area you are interested in and you can focus primarily on Perspective and Lighting. Do that until you become more confident of your skills or bored with the subject matter. Do something that excites you and focus on just a few skills at a time. For me the absolute fundamentals were Construction and Lighting. So for a few years I focused on those skills almost exclusively, practicing for hours to be able to draw perfectly straight lines and circles by hand and moving on to constructing objects and lighting them. After that I spent almost two years improving my painting process (which gives me confidence that if it looks like it's all going sideways I know by the end I will have something that looks decent), composition (a huge lightbulb moment was understanding that I should spend 50-75% of the time on a drawing at the sketch and lineart stages) and colour. I'm by no means an expert in any of those areas and I still have a lot to improve, but now I'm looking to move more into creature and character design. Hope that helps!