@freddie82 The Shading the Pancake Hobo course was very helpful to me when it comes to the workflow of creating different kinds of cycles materials, and on the side covers texturing-by-stencil in Blender quite well.
I would also recommend the three-part series on YouTube beginning with this video, covering different classes of materials via the new Principled Shader.
Also, in Kent’s tutorial on Customizing your Startup File, there’s a portion where he creates a node group, gives it a fake user, and saves it as part of his startup file so it’s always available whenever he starts a new project. You can do this not only with utility node groups, but whole materials if you ever come up with a material that you think could be versatile but don’t want to have to learn how to make over and over again.
