First, I think it’s good that you put some thought into how you could create your own curriculum and it made me think about how I learned it. To be honest I still have not much of an idea how I came to where I’m now. I never studied art on a school. I’m basically 100% self taught since art class in the schools where I went to were either more of history classes with occasional painting (usually just copying the works we discussed before) or do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-you-don’t-bother-the teacher" kinda classes.
So I can’t give you much of an advice when it comes to schools but maybe it helps you (or someone else reading this) when I tell you what helped me most, when I was teaching myself.
First off, I’m just an amateur, so take everything I write with a spoon of salt, but I managed to sell a few works in the past for several hundred bits (if that means anything to you).
I’m a bit like you. I don’t like long videos. In fact I don’t like videos at all. I have some art books that came with videos I never watched to this day. I learn a lot from books. When I start a new Book I usually read through it and all the lessons at least once before even doing one exercise. Now that I think of it, I often learn big parts of the books lessons until I know them by heart before even painting. This proved useful because I didn’t have to put my nose back in the books every five minutes. I could redo or practice a lesson while on the go, or on the phone or when I got hold of a spare pen and an old recipe to draw on. Sometimes I dig out old lessons from the book and check if I still do everything correctly. I often find my self in habits that started as small mistakes and got stuck in my brain without me even noticing it. Checking the books again helps finding these bad habits.
Youtube videos are cool and sometimes helpful but they often build on knowledge that is explained nowhere. You can’t flip some pages back to check what they are talking about. When they show you how they draw a fox you already have to basically know how to draw a fox to pull it off. Although I guess that is not much of a problem when taking an online course since I’m sure (I hope) they order their material in a didactic way.
Did I mention I like books? Books are usually self contained and easy to work with by just working through it from the beginning to the end.
Don’t be afraid to accidentally buy a book that is above your level, you can still get anther one that is more basic and get to it later.
A few Users already collected some good books and other resources in this thread:
Collaborating with other artist helped me a lot, especially in the early days. Collaborations give you useful insights on how other artists approach the same things and you can learn from it. Try to get you hands on a few permanent partners. Do lessons together when you are on the same level. Collaborators can help you focus on what you want to learn at the moment by doing your boilerplate work. Want to focus on learning coloring? Ask your collab partner for sketches they would otherwise throw away so you can focus on coloring a batch of pieces, or doing outlines, shading, you name it. You will also create loads of sketches and linearts just for training, give them to your partners. Check each others works for mistakes in perspective and anatomy, discuss why they did the things they did the way they did, why they did take some artistic license at some point or not. If you find a mistake in the others work, this is a huge learning opportunity for both. You can also learn a lot about yourself by explaining to others why you did something the way you did. I was lucky to have collab partners that were better than I so I could quickly soak up some of their knowledge, try to do the same. Collaborating is also a lot of fun and in my case sometimes turned into art fights with funny results :D.
Drawing 100 lines, circles and boxes a day. Yeah that’s something I never did, although its advised in some of the books I have. However I kinda do these exercises and I advice to do it. But don’t make it a chore. Don’t sit down and draw circles for two hours. Do it as a warm up instead. Like an athlete warms up and stretches their muscles, you as an artist can also warm up by drawing some circles, squiggly lines and cartoon faces to warm up, make your arm ready (or wrist) and get the juices flowing before you dive into a 4 hour painting session. This way it’s less of a chore and in no time you are laughing about people who need the stabilizer to make a nice line without even realizing it. And most important, it does feel less of a chore to practice the very basics.
Don’t waste time for finding your style. I kid you not, I learned this the hard way. When I got serious with art I was into Manga (I guess like everyone at that time) and I took a lot of time to “find” my style. And by find I mean force me to do something in a specific way just because I wanted my style to be unique and recognizable or look like the artists I admired. What a waste of time, the style developed all by itself much later when I stopped caring about it.
More general is good at first but it is impossible to learn all of it at once. Spread out, get a taste of it all and then dive into whats most fun at the moment until you are bored of it, then do something else, repeat.
Do what is most fun. This sounds like a no-brainer but it is not. I’ve seen a lot of autodidact artist forcing themselves to do stuff just because its next in their books. Don’t want to do landscapes at the moment? Skip it for now and draw cute anime boys. You will come back to landscapes eventually when you see that your backgrounds suck (that’s how it is for me at the moment). Fun is a huge driver. Maybe it’s obvious for most people but especially important for someone like me who is stuck with serious depression.
Well, I guess that’s enough incoherent off topic mumbling from me (for now).
Finally I have a last anecdote regarding art schools. I had three friends who went to different private art schools. Two of them were very disappointed that they couldn’t draw better than me after years of studying and one of them (I have to mention she was already really good before) really soared but is now studying bio-engineering or something (still an amazing artist). So I guess, just because you went to art school, doesn’t guaranty that you learn anything from it. Everyone learns a bit different find out how you learn best and you can probably even do it without a school.