I've been trying to learn to draw since basically forever. I've only gotten any real traction the last three weeks or so. Difference is this time I've been doing some copy-work. Basically pull up a finished drawing someone did, and draw the exact same thing. It's sort of staggering how quickly that levels you up. I'll combine that with fairly focused studies, e.g. re-drawing a characters face shape a dozen times, just to get a good feel for it. In addition copy-work is nice because you get to an end-result that's presentable reasonably quickly.
I'm not slowly foraying into doing more original things which seems to be going loads better than before I did the copy-work. Currently I'm practicing drawing hands, and while it's not like I'm producing good sketches of hands, I can now totally see the path from where I am to good sketches of hands.
I'll share a sequence of sketches so you can see what a study looks like for me. This started off with trying to draw a specific characters hand in a specific pose, but turned into more of a "well how about figuring out hands in general first" thing:
3. Took a break on hands, did a bunch more copy work of complete characters etc. Got slightly better at confident lines.
4. Returned to hands, switched to using my own hand for reference. Ignore the missing finger, I misjudged the spacing but pressed on regardless. You can clearly see the improvement from when I started: https://i.imgur.com/fZduLG1.jpg
5. Where I am today, probably going to need to practice different angles, but it'll be basically more of the same. Keep doing copy-work, Keep doing studies.
Important part of studies is to draw the same thing multiple times I feel. Do a sketch, try to avoid hating yourself for it being bad too much, pick one thing to improve. E.g. for the study sketches linked I've picked "try perspective" as improvement, but "get the right number of fingers" or "make the fingers the right length" are equally valid goals.
Notably absent from my workflow is tutorials or art-books. I'm sure those will come in handy once I've got the basics down, but for now they are just frustrating non-help. I'm making significant progress week-over-week still.
tl;dr: Copy work and studies is what works for me. Copy-work gets the strokes into your muscle memory. Studies helps you get a feel for how and why to place strokes.
I'm not slowly foraying into doing more original things which seems to be going loads better than before I did the copy-work. Currently I'm practicing drawing hands, and while it's not like I'm producing good sketches of hands, I can now totally see the path from where I am to good sketches of hands.
I'll share a sequence of sketches so you can see what a study looks like for me. This started off with trying to draw a specific characters hand in a specific pose, but turned into more of a "well how about figuring out hands in general first" thing:
0. I started with copy work, decent results, did a couple of these: https://i.imgur.com/3Fb3kDY.jpg
1. I moved on to trying to do a hand using no refs, somewhat predictable results, doesn't look like anything: https://i.imgur.com/wvgm1F3.jpg
2. After a bunch of repeating the same exact drawing it's starting to look like a thing: https://i.imgur.com/oMEVhOM.jpg
3. Took a break on hands, did a bunch more copy work of complete characters etc. Got slightly better at confident lines.
4. Returned to hands, switched to using my own hand for reference. Ignore the missing finger, I misjudged the spacing but pressed on regardless. You can clearly see the improvement from when I started: https://i.imgur.com/fZduLG1.jpg
5. Where I am today, probably going to need to practice different angles, but it'll be basically more of the same. Keep doing copy-work, Keep doing studies.
Important part of studies is to draw the same thing multiple times I feel. Do a sketch, try to avoid hating yourself for it being bad too much, pick one thing to improve. E.g. for the study sketches linked I've picked "try perspective" as improvement, but "get the right number of fingers" or "make the fingers the right length" are equally valid goals.
Notably absent from my workflow is tutorials or art-books. I'm sure those will come in handy once I've got the basics down, but for now they are just frustrating non-help. I'm making significant progress week-over-week still.
tl;dr: Copy work and studies is what works for me. Copy-work gets the strokes into your muscle memory. Studies helps you get a feel for how and why to place strokes.