I think one of the best advices I can give is to try Gesture Drawing: it helps with anatomy of your drawings and I noticed a great improvement in my drawings pretty quickly and I've been drawing for a good 15 years.

It's where you look at a pose and try to replicate it in 10 seconds. Here's an example


You have to do this a lot, but once you do, doing poses becomes second nature and easier. And best of all you can apply this to any character you want!

And as for using references, Use them for studying and developing your own style. It helps to find what style you like and makes making more art fun.

Also it's okay if you're not good now, learning from you're bad art is how you end up making good art.

And Always experiment! Try new things! it's helps a lot!

@carbon Ok so i got started drawing seriously in about 6th grade because i loved the sonic the hedgehog series so much i wanted to draw all of the characters lol so I learned how to draw by just drawing the things i liked!! when i got into highschool i took art classes which helped me out a lot, but i've learned on my own mostly. and i've been drawing seriously for about 8-9yrs. I'm gonna link some things i found helpful when i was beginning :)

Tutorial: How to draw anything i love this one i still follow this method when i want to draw something new

Sycra on Youtube There's so many helpful tutorials and most of them are pretty easy to follow in my opinion :)

Quickposes.com I loved this website for gesture drawings! though i think its only humans, i can't seem to find any options for animal gestures.

i hope these help! my advice, as corny and cliche as it is, is to just keep drawing! and try not to compare your skills to others too much! I struggled with that for a while but once I started to view other artists as peers rather than competition, drawing became a lot more fun

Thanks all for the encouragement and advice!

I'll go ahead and bookmark Sycra now, since so many people found it useful, and I'll start digging into the other resources. And in the meantime I'll keep on drawing.