I believe sort of strongly that nobody is fully self-taught, and everyone is partially self-taught.
I've been drawing since I could hold a crayon, and I liked describing myself as self-taught before I went to college; it sounded more impressive to say that nobody taught me. But that's not quite true. I checked out every How To Draw book I could find, I studied every tutorial I ran into online once the internet became a thing, and I used to hang out on an art forum where artists would ask for critique on their pieces. I didn't post much, but I read the advice that everyone else got. I read pages and pages and pages of critique. I learned to study other artists and try to learn from the art I liked. I absorbed bits and pieces from every artist I interacted with who gave me tips here and there as a kid.
And then I went to art school in college, and to be honest, it helped more than I ever expected -- but so much of it was professors pointing me in the right direction. There was a lot of advice I got that didn't truly click with me until I started making my own comic, and things that I'd already technically learned in school finally made sense a year, two years later when I had worked with those concepts myself and seen them in the context of a comic I cared about and made my own mistakes. And like, so much of my improvement came from classmates, too? There's a couple of things that still rattle around in my head when I work that just came from a classmate giving me a tip they heard one time. A lot of what I got out of college was really similar to what I got out of that one art forum -- just more hands-on and intense.
The idea that if you took classes then someone else taught you how to draw, but if you didn't take classes then you taught yourself how to draw, doesn't quite ring true to me. Most self-taught artists have learned from others, they just had to pick their own avenues of study and set their own deadlines. Most formally-taught artists had to teach themselves, they just had guides to help speed up some parts of the journey.
