Soo...I want to start drawing, I've always liked copying other drawings, but when I try to draw my own stuff in my own style I fail miserably, I don't know where to get started and my drawings just look like something drawn by a 5 year old. How did y'all get started?? Did you use tutorials, did you go to art lessons or just learned by yourselves??

I started at five, and continued drawing till now.

I've improved, slowly, by simply taking my time. I've also tried to various how-tos, vids, and what not.

Nothing helped but two things.

A - Learning to drawing using stick figures and overlaying them in pologons to get basic body shape and proportion control.

B - Challenging myself to draw increasingly more difficult drawings.

I went from drawing mediocre stuff to drawing monsters with scales, fins, fangs, and teeth.

That was in one year.

Now I'm moving onto trying my hand at drawing people in armour.

Practice and having the confidence to challenge yourself constantly, without relying on a 'comfort zone' also help immensely.

The best advice I can give is this:

Use manga and fantasy art drawing guides that break down a figure into its basic components. AKA a stick figure, and overlaying or fleshing it out with rectangles, circles, squares or polygons.

You'll soon get the feel for proportion control.

Use those as a start, and don't worry about inches or cms for measurements. Just draw. You'll have to do it alot to get used to this style of drawing, but know that all artists, especially the pros use this method to draw.

It's a good start.

After that, practice as much as you can and as often as you can.

Also watch sports docs or games or whatever where people are moving. This will give you an idea of how the human body moves. It also works in watching animals move or simply stand still or sit. So what your pets too.

Try drawing them, aka like a fish swimming.

Learning how things move is also part of the figure drawing process.

After that it's just practice.

~ Pyre

What Pyreite described is called framing &/ blocking, which is key for most sketch work, and is very useful even for inanimate objects. Art classes help, they show you the techniques to create the desired effects you want to achieve. Such as learning and understanding perspectives, foreshortening, shading, anatomy, etc.

Beyond that, it just practicing (lots of practicing), and experimenting with mediums (ink, pencil, charcoal, paint, digital, mixed, etc.) until you find what works best for you.

For beginning, I'd recommend sketching still lifes to hone your abilities at sketching shapes. Go outside, draw what you see. For drawing people, most art stores sell articulated mannequins, that can be posed into different positions that will help with keeping proportions for more dynamic sketches.

Mostly, just have fun and play around with it.

You want a good introductory course to better your figure drawing or to start drawing. Google Proko, and watch his videos. I'm using the free ones and they're amazing.

I recommended his site.

~ Pyre