Sculptor here. Everything here about the pottery experiment is 100% on point, as is that one famous Ira Glass quote. The fastest way to make enormous leaps and bounds as an artist is to focus on quantity rather than quality. When you start out, your quality is going to be terrible. Embrace it! Wallow in it! Accept the inevitable ugliness before you even get started! The Ira Glass quote in particular taught me to love and revel in the ugly prototype phase. And with each ugly piece you churn out, pick out one thing to improve on next time. Repeat until you finally get where you wanna go. Never start something with the intentions of the first round also being the final piece, there will always be something you'll wish you did differently.

I will also say, photorealism is 100% about the craftsmanship. That said, practice things like shading gradients diligently. Constantly. Stretch em, squeeze em, do the for wide and narrow ranges of shades. And start TODAY. Fill up entire sketchbooks of nothing but shading practice just for the sake of going through the motions. These are the building blocks as fundamental as musical scales. When I first got into working with cut paper, I wasn't sure what i wanted to make, but I started practicing with an Xacto knife anyway. I spent 6 months practicing before I finally had a vision of something I wanted to make, and by that time, my xacto knife skills were able to match it. THAT is what you want. I would make it a point to devoting your entire first year to nothing but this kind of practice. Do little life sketches and sketches of the folds in cloth, but don't linger on any single one for very long. As has already been stated, you're better off devoting time to lots of rough little things than one big polished thing.

You got this!