Then practice, educate yourself, investigate those aspects and figure out how to make your art look better. As well, incorporate all the things you're learning, even the ones you dislike, realism, shapes, inanimate objects are important as well.
I am not sure what to say about your style because I am not sure what direction you want to go in. The first one looks like Doug
Which has a more cartoony and “rubber hose” look.
Cartoon, anime, realism, etc. whatever style you are going for, it doesn’t hurt to study anatomy and do gesture drawings. There is a saying “you have to know the rules before you break them”.
I would also recommend just experimenting with a bunch of different styles. Good practice is drawing your characters in other people’s style. It will help you see the little details that goes into someone’s style and sort of makes you look at things from a different perspective.
I also would recommend pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. This does go hand in hand with experimenting but I am also asking you to draw things like hands and shoes and other things like that. The only way I got better at drawing hands was forcing myself to draw them.
That is called still life. That is the start of fundamentals. You will learn pressure control, perspective, lighting, and arm/wrist movement. That's where you start. You can't just go straight to more advance art not having a foundation or you will just learn mistakes and reinforce them by repeating them. Patience. No one learned to draw well in a year or two, it takes decades.
Life drawing can sound lame and boring at first, but what you're doing is learning to see the subject and recognize details and apply them to a drawing. These are super important skills as a good basis for drawing. You will be able to apply this skill to figure drawing, coloring, gestures, lighting, etc, all sorts of things as you level up as an artist. The more you do stuff like this, you'll see vast improvements in your art. Like many other people said, it takes a lifetime of learning and nonstop practice. Even professionals at the top of their craft still practice life drawing to keep their basic skills sharp. You can't build a solid house on an unstable base.
I am aware of what a still life is. But the way the class assigns them I don't think they're very helpful. I don't feel any better at drawing than I was at the start of the class, and drawing the negative space of a chair felt like a waste of time to be since it wasn't connected to anything else. I don't feel like the still life's made me any better at shading and value than I was before drawing them either, and even if they did I mostly draw digital art.
The point of negative space drawings are forcing your brain to look at things from a different perspective. Most beginners tend to just see and draw things as outlines but struggle when it comes to making those outlines look right. Negetive space has you look at shapes and the shapes within forms.
Like if you struggle with hands, knowing negative space can help with this. Instead of seeing it as this complex thing, you are seeing it simply as a shape.
That's because the teacher is trying to train your brain to observe the world and see how objects are placed in a space. It also helps you learn about composition lines which can help with observation. If you start doing complex shading to a drawing with bad composition, it's not going to look right.
Ok, I'm going to treat you like an adult as I don't know what age you are. If you are taking a still life drawing class and you are not getting better, that is on you. There is only two reasons. One: you think you have already learn about the stuff in class and have nothing more to learn from the class set-up. This means you just need to push yourself and ignore the class. Work on what you need to work on. Unless you are drawing photo realistic art, you can still learn. Two: The teacher isn't teaching correctly. This is a hard one as it's very easy to blame some one else for you not learning. But ask questions. See where you are weak and ask the teacher to help fix it. It's their job. Be the best in your class, blow away the teacher with how awesome you are. Go above and beyond.
My point is you need to just sit down and draw in a formal setting. Stop drawing character like the above. You are not at a point that is going to help you. Your form needs work. A class gives you a structure to learn how to draw as you work on things in a set progression. Drawing is not talent, it's a skill. Skills need to be learned.
I think it's my fault actually. I struggled to get these drawings done in a timely fashion, and ended up getting them in late and having to rush them for that reason. So I guess that limited my ability to learn from these.
Okay. But I feel like the negative space thing could still be seen through just the outlines, just in reverse, and a better way to learn is to try making art without lines.
Honestly, and I know this goes against what a lot of people are saying, I don't think you necessarily have to go through all of traditional drawing training to be good at drawing anything. Now, that does depend on what you want to draw, like if you want to draw almost perfectly realistic or semi realistic people it would be helpful to learn how to draw the folds of fabric and measure facial proportions like would be taught in a still life class.
Personally, I've been drawing for quite a few years and have only started taking classes within the last year. I think that the still life classes certainly helped me, particularly with backgrounds, but I think I was able to find my style beforehand. The only thing I could say about your drawings right now is they feel like you don't have a specific style in mind so they don't look confident. But that's something only practice will fix. Experimenting until you find what you like to draw should come first in my mind. While knowing how to draw realistically is nice, if someone wants to draw very stylized, I don't think they absolutely need to know how to draw a still life first.
Just keep practicing. You could watch some how to draw comics, manga youtube tutorials, or speedpaints.
There are 4 simple things you can do to improve your art, things you don´t need
a course for:
-use reference
-try to draw with more dynamic lines
-try to make everything you draw 3 dimensional
-colors: every color you are using is 100% saturated, you can check that in your drawing
app, pick a color and just put the saturation to 30% instead of 100%
Draw the same picture you drew with the lady holding the 2 guns with a reference.
Choose an interesting pose. Not straight on, try a reference which already looks interesting
and dynamic. Put it next to your drawing or try the line of action to train that.
Then try to draw with shapes instead of drawing the outlines, that will take a while
to learn that but that´s something that will make your art look better in the long run
here is a good resource for women holding guns
Sorry, but in that gun girl drawing I made she’s propelling herself into the air with grappling hooks, something that none of these poses are of, so I don’t think any of these poses will work for me since they’re all on the ground and stuff.
Art is more of a mindset than anything. Learned that the hard way. Unfortunately, nobody's born with these skills. It takes dedication and patience and the right attitude before putting the pencil on a paper.
I did plenty of mistakes and one of them comparing others and also, it's better getting things done than getting things perfect. By the way, perfection does suck. Imperfections make the work better.
Whether you call yourself good, bad, better, worse, all that crap doesn't matter as long as you're working on it. What are you afraid of? Sucking? I suck, as well, but hey, that doesn't matter.
Let me share this that got me back to drawing and got my confidence back:
My art went from this:
to this:
In 17/18 years.
Unfortunately, it doesn't happen overnight and everyone of us have their insecurities but I found ways to channel them. Use more of your mind when working and less emotions... keep the emotions in check and be the one who's in control.
Do I still have work to do? Absolutely. Learn structure... anatomy... find tutorials... find references... shading and most importantly... do art for you and once you get feedback... take the things that YOU need and leave the ones that don't matter that much. Work on it every single day. It's okay to be a bit selfish as an artist. It's gonna be a bumpy ride and make most of it. Work with what you have right now and improve on it and worry about the other parts when you get there.
Even if you made mistakes, OWN IT! Be proud of it!!! "YEAH! I DID THAT! WHAT ABOUT IT???"
Toss the "I can't do it" mindset in the trash and put on "BRING IT ON!!! I'M FUCKING DOING IT!!! I'M GONNA KICK ASS, BABY!!!!"
Many have given you answers, to simply make art better you have to draw alot! Just draw a lot what you want to draw, look at real life to learn anatomy better, to find what you like and want in a style you can always save pictures of those artists you like and break it down to what you like with their styles, is a person drawing eyes a way you really like, study that, is someone else drawing lines a certain way, study that part etc and eventually what defines you will show.
But those things will change a lot as well, you wont just wake up the next day and suddenly have your defined art style, the more we learn the more our style changes/evolves 