You may want to take a gander at Marco Bucci's book about creativity and the campfire (5 bucks for kindle version). It is a look at myths of talent and inspiration from someone that is a pro artist and have thought a lot about things.

A thing I'd like to add is that it really helps to figure out what brings you joy to draw. It is a lot of work to acquire great drawing skills, but if you work on things that brings you joy then it does not feel like nearly as much grind. And also: The trick is to stick with it long enough that you get over the hump to where you can make technically imperfect drawings that still feels like they have promise. Then the fire becomes self fuelling and it is a great feeling. You need to grind some to get to this point, but then the momentum takes hold. Also: You can draw fun things from day one without it being photo realistic if you adopt the proper mind set: Look at Ivan Brunetti's book on comic production or Lynda Barries syllabus book about comics. Both of them focus on immediately working on storytelling without getting held up by drawing skills. You start with what is essentially just a figure that is a few simple basic shapes and figure out how to do meaningful things with this. The drawing skill will accumulate as you keep working on the underlying subject matter you care about.

So glad it helped! Random bits: The preponderance of folks in art are really happy to answer questions and offer critique, so don’t feel weird about asking. To some extent, we’re all perpetually beginners if we’re doing it right because the human experience is perpetually changing and we’ll never have life figured out, and that’s the core medium we’re all working with, really. Any folks with the stack overflow “RTFM Noob” vibes, or tryhard “git gud“ vibes are just trying to externalize their fight against their own feelings of inadequacy, and you should probably ignore them. Their perspective will always be about juxtaposing their work above yours, even if they don’t explicitly say so, or even realize they’re doing it.

Crit can be tough to swallow but it’s often harder to give than receive, so don’t punish the other person by succumbing to the temptation of getting super defensive. When you find yourself going into that mode, just stop yourself if you can… disengage if you need to. You’ll regret not doing so. Good faith crit you completely disagree with can be incredibly valuable: knowing something lands differently with a non-zero sum of people is worth knowing. Either way, just politely thank them for their input and move on. When you get confident enough to start offering feedback, you’ll realize how important it is to give people leeway with their reactions! The criticism feels personal because it is: art is personal. It’s just going to feel awkward or contentious sometimes because we’re all human. It’s usually easier for the receiver to distinguish between someone nervous about giving negative feedback, and someone trying to insult you, than it is for the critic.

Really try to dig into the theoretical and conceptual side of things, too. The technical stuff is appealing because it’s easily defined and most laypeople don’t even consciously see beyond it… but being able to communicate things you might not even be able to put into words is the important part. If something is meaningful to you, or scratches some aesthetic itch, follow that thread. There’s a really good chance it will resonate with others. If not, knowing that it doesn’t is all part of getting good at art. You won’t develop that concentrating on technique alone, but you will develop your technique exploring the other stuff, though especially at first, the technical stuff about form, space, perception, and mark making are super important. Especially the very core stuff like mark quality are waaay more consequential being able to express yourself than being able to tell exactly for far this thing is from that thing and putting the line in the right place right away.

Good luck!!<3