Trying to understand proportions and value. (My first post)

Hi, I'm Sarah!

 I'm a concept art student from the UK. I have studied art from GCSE to now studying a BA. 

Art education in the UK isn't the most informative and I have never once heard "Fundamentals" until I came to university. I had always wondered why, no matter how much I drew, I couldn't make my art look as awesome as the concept art I was consuming on the internet. I always thought my art education would of given me the information I needed to get to that level and never really thought to look elsewhere.
But now I have really started to realise where I am going wrong, I have really been motivated! I am determined to work on my fundamentals to become skilled, I will take my time and NOT rush. There's still a lot to learn but that's exciting to me. I can't wait to slowly understand each fundamental in detail and then learn how to apply it to becoming a skill AND efficient concept artist.
I will always be filled with a thousand and one ideas but I have learnt It will be easier to communicate them the more fundamentals I learn.

So with that ramble out of the way I bring you a proportion study which I eventually used to practice value to. I started off by watching a few lessons of "Essentials of Realism with Jonathan Hardesty".
I have been using the three stage method since, just on scrap pieces of paper and using SketchDaily and Line-of-action for reference.
I decided to really put it into practice and not do it as practice but to really put time into it. So I decided to document each stage I did. 

I started off by plotting a few plum lines on my reference image, using that I then could roughly work out the angles, I wanted to capture a very basic outline and shadow shapes. To help with the shadow shapes I manipulated my reference to really help me see where I could lay my shapes.

For the second block in I wanted to capture form so I started thinking about prominent shapes that really capture and make it stand out.

For my final block in i wanted to add details and also to correct my shapes by going back onto my reference and comparing plum lines to my block in. 

 From there I decided to work on line and learn and understand how a block in can help effect my art. 

I wanted to colour the piece since I really like the colours in the reference photo, however recently I have realised I use colour as a cheat. If I don't understand value I use colour. This makes my art's values and saturation very unusual (and not in a good way) making my art very hard to read. 

So I started with a two value study, with this I captured the basic shadows. But from this I decided to push on and started with adding darker values, before getting suggested that I do a sphere test to understand the values and how to try and work them 

With that I then kept working until I got to a result I was somewhat happy with. I didn't want to over work it so I left it there. 

If any artist (or non artist!) finds this page and has any feedback I would be happy to hear.

I can't wait to continue to document my journey of exploring fundamentals on here.