this video talks about how to practice light and colour by making colour studies

A colour study is a simple thing. You take something crazy basic like an egg or an apple and you study how light hits it. How does colour wrap around the egg? How does sunlight pour through a jar of honey?

yesterday I saw a video about cinematography where he recommended making cinematography studies: copying famous shots and experimenting with sequences of shots.

Both of these videos had this common theme of just continuously
thinking about the thing you want to learn. it reminds me of that quote
“perfect practice makes perfect.” the point being, you’ll learn much
faster and become better if you don’t just blindly practice but you
consciously focus on the thing you want to learn. You look at what the
masters do, you do quick exercises and longer projects.

I wonder how to apply this to animation - the art of a short powerful animated story. It means watch the best short animations and try to emulate what worked. then go off and experiment.

It feels like creativity involves inputting great stuff - the stuff you make will be similar to what you have seen. Then emulating the stuff that worked to see why it did. Then experimenting means going off script and doing something new. I like that.