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[Hide] (997.8KB, 1415x2000) >>101329
Hey I'm late and I'm not the best to help you, but I went through what you're at and got the skills I wanted so here.
The anon at the bottom of that thread saying you just need to draw often and copy artists you like is absolutely correct, and the guy saying he hasn't improved was a larper. It doesn't matter if you use tablet or pencil so long as you draw often, but I personally recommend drawing with mechanical pencil even if you prefer digital because you can get a small hardback notebook and draw while lying in bed before you sleep, draw your dreams when you wake up, draw while waiting out of the house etc. The quality of your drawings doesn't really matter and that's what stuck me for years -a rookie drawfag will lean in really close and obsess over details, erasing and redrawing for hours, but that's training you on the ephemeral moment of you current drawing and doesn't build real skills. You need to sit up straight and look at the whole drawing(your breathing will also make your hand shake when you lean forward) try to keep the whole thing in your mind as you put down each line and compare proportions, keep orientation in mind. Learn to break up the body into simple pieces, like the jaw as two lines in a V and understand how that looks from different angles, connect it to the next piece like the collarbone and fill in the space between. It's important to think of characters or stories you want to draw to keep motivated. If you do quick 1-5 minute drawings at least daily you'll learn the basics in a year's time, and it will start to be fun as a hobby. At that point you'll be able to find the shape of what you're drawing, and the next phase is building it outward to completion.
You'll also need to study anatomy as you go, but here's some advice. The exact shape of the bones isn't important, because there's a layer of hard tissue above that which can take myriad weird shapes -your cheek"bones" are an example of not matching the bones at all and vary wildly across race. The cranium is made of many bones that form a roughly spherical shape, but each bone can have boxy oblong variances, but anime characters can have a nearly perfect spherical cranium -always look for simplest shapes, they often look cutest anyways. A lot of drawing material is very detailed, and comes from the idea of drawing as noticing details, but the artists often have a poor understanding of anatomy and can't provide much useful information nor probably produce much without a reference. "Artistic anatomy of the human figure" is a good, short, old book. A lot of drawing guides show the body reduced to simple armature shapes, but I really don't recommend that way of thinking even though I'm hardly an authority; it will cause anatomy problems when the figure moves certain ways, and the true structure of the human body isn't that complicated. You start with the head -a rigid structure when the mouth is closed- and you can just follow the spine down to the pelvis -flexes mostly in the lumbar- Then the legs have simple joints. The arms float next to the ribcage -you can easily stretch your shoulder directly out to side which internally causes the bones to separate a bit. Drawing starting from the head creates issues when you want to put the feet firmly on the ground, but there are two legs anyways so I suggest marking head size, then finding the pelvis height above the ground, then draw from the head down and find the feet against the ground. Don't put too much stock in anatomy demonstrations -the contours are affected by the balance of fat and muscle and can take many forms between extremes -again just copy your favorite artists.
So yeah. You first need the basics of being able to find the first rough form of something, draw often to get there and it'll happen on its own. Then you study anatomy and find the finished form from there. I went from burning myself out with no progress whatsoever to being able to draw the highest level I cared to reach within 1.5 years this way, though I was studying anatomy like crazy.