Lines.

Art is basically taking reality, or some version of it, some image of it that is real, or is as if real in our minds, and rendering it onto some surface or into some medium in such a way so that it can be interpreted as what it was intended to be. For instance, if you decide to draw a live human being, you're not putting flesh and blood on the paper, you're putting a mark here, a line there, a couple of shapes here and there.. and our brain interprets all that nonsense as "human" just as surely as it interprets all these crazy squiggles as words and ideas.

It's just taking an image...

And transforming it into lines....

The catch is, each line represents something in the original image.


So basically, learning how to draw is a long process of figuring out what lines look more believably like what you're trying to draw. You can copy photographs or anime pictures or video game character designs your whole life, and learn how to see things and replicate them, but it matters more what you can do with a blank sheet of paper.. Putting together elements you like to create something of your own.br>
For example, in elementary school, I used to draw a lot of hamsters. I thought hamsters were great. I had a bunch of them. One of them was named Pizza Fuzzy.

All I did to draw these was copy an image out of a book a couple dozen times until I'd memorized how to do it, and then reproduced the image from memory whenever I was bored at school. If called upon to draw something more original, thought, it would end up more like this:


It's easy to tell when people have been only copying for quite a while, because all their faces look the same, and bodies are always drawn at the same angles, and all their characters look like they could be the same body with different kinds of hair.

The best solution I have for bridging copying to true drawing is to make comics. Comics force one to draw things one would never think of to draw before. Odd angles, new poses, hands, toes, backgrounds, perspective.. All the good things about art come out in comics. Comics force one to learn.

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