How do you practice drawing? Are you using tutorials and draw several simple drawings on what tutorial covered? Or maybe using art challenges or prompts? What works for you the best and what doesn't?
Also, what do you want to focus on improving in your arts?
(definitely not me looking for some new art challenges ideas cx i love those so much)
Here are some things I've tried, maybe some of you would find those ideas useful
Learning basics from tutorials : I prepared a playlist with various art theory tutorials on yt (composition, perspective, negative space, colours, etc) and then tried to practice. I didn't do exercises like in the videos, just tried to incorporate gained knowledge in my illustrations later on and be more mindful about planning my drawing. This actually helped me improve a lot (from 'I hate my drawings, they're so boring' to 'okay I'm happy with it')
Draw This Again : with friends we did a draw-this-again challenge, doing one redraw per month, starting with art we did 12 years earlier, then 11 years, etc. It was great, as you can easily see how your drawing changed. Also having a base of an old art takes away the 'I don't know what to draw' part of the process, and you can focus on finding there things to improve. I feel like my best illustrations come from this challenge, highly recommend, need to find time to do it again.
Draw This In Your Style : there are a lot of DTIYS challenges on ig, though to be honest this type of challenge does not work for me at all.
Backgrounds from Photos: I picked quite a lot photos I took during vacations/trips in different locations or seasons, put them into one folder, and then selected or used a random number generator to get one on which I would then base a background of my new drawing. It wasn't supposed to be just tracing a photo, the photo was supposed to be an inspiration for the scenery, and I wanted to place one of my OCs somewhere there. It was quite challenging, especially having to think of how to simplify what I see on the photo to match my style. But I've improved a lot because of this challenge, again, highly recommend.
Themes / prompts: so challenges like mermay, march of robots, 100 themes challenge etc. I tried it few times but for me it works only if combined with other challenges.
10 minutes drawings : with friends we would pick one reference picture from the internet, and then we had 10 minutes to sketch it. Quite fun, though I like other challenges more.
Drawing OCs from photos: this is a challenge that I'm currently doing with friends. We randomly pick photos of our families & friends and sketch our characters in those poses. We try to select photos with interesting or challenging poses so it's actually helping us improve. There are about 3-5 photos a week to draw from, and I love it. Not only I can practice drawing poses I wouldn't draw otherwise, but also later my sketchbook looks like a family album of my characters
In the future I would like to try drawing different body types using Kibbe system, as currently my characters have similar proportions no matter what height and weight they are. It might be interesting to pay more attention to bone structure etc.