One thing I’d suggest is to practice whatever lessons you learn.
One of my mistakes was jumping from course to course too quickly.
If you take a shading course and don’t make sure you apply what you learned, then you’ll kind of lose that knowledge over time.
The same applies to lighting.
Modeling is where everything starts, but if you take lighting and shading make sure to practice with most your projects.
Edit: If you’re an animator you don’t need to make your own models, you can use somebody else’s, but a model needs to exist before you can animate it.
