“I wish you would keep needing me. I wish I could do even that. That excuse to get permission. I wish I would have it. With that excuse, I wish I could stay alive. With you”
I talked about something very similar here but lemme continue:
The only reason I started to improve with digital work was when I started doing traditional studies. They suck at first, they take time, and the initial payoff is nonexistent, but you need them. Go to figure drawing lessons with a good ol’ pad of large paper and some charcoal. Sit down and draw stuff in your house in pencil and hold yourself to making it look realistic.
For digital work in general I’d recommend some wet media experience (like watercolor) but stay on the dryer side (pencil, charcoal, graphite) as that’s how tablets work. I would recommend acrylic if you do digital painting.
Draw environments from life! Collage different scenes or bits you’ve drawn to make one larger piece, try to get the shadows to cast correctly, the proportions to look ok. I recommend so much traditional work because you start learning how to use different aspects of a tool much quicker, like using the side of your pencil or charcoal on a rough surface- they feel more intuitive to experiment with than a set of brushes.
If you’re stuck, open a new file and do some studies. No obligation to get it perfect or right, but get an idea of the form of what’s troubling you. Even if you want to stylize hands, do some studies of hands- just 2-3 minutes, a little shading- you’ll learn how to gauge commitment in time, but realize you’re less likely to follow an impossible goal than a less ambitious one, but those less ambitious ones can build up, and they’re realistic. Knowing what reality is can really help you get over blocks like that.
Your digital set up works fine, I would suggest looking into getting access to a PC program for your sketching depending on how much you use the IPad Pro, many people use that for roughs but you may find moving into a painting or lining stage in there before moving to medibang could be difficult. Tools don’t make the artist but they do affect how easy it is to work.
Finally, it’s important to be conscious of what you’ve done right as well as what you need to improve. If you’re good with portraits and hair, what made that work well? Use whatever has already worked for you and shown success- more than any advice I’ve given you’ve already found something out. If drawing in math class helped you improve faces, why not do feet? It’s easy to forget you drew faces on your homework for three years, but you did, and that helped you improve. Be aware of what you’ve done, it’s not all just finished pieces. Experiment and try new things, but when it comes to brute learning, you’ve already seemed to make progress, there’s not that much difference in painting a face as a foot.
Get people to look at your work. Get feedback. You may see no progress but someone else may. They also may realize something you don’t, maybe torsos always look off because of how you draw shoulders, but you never knew because you thought it had something to do with the rib cage. Feedback is scary at first but you learn to take it and then there is nothing stopping you. You adapt to your weaknesses. You work on them. And you come back and work on the even harder things to accomplish. but this is all one step at a time, critiques help because you get this in steps. They won’t worry about getting skin texture until you master anatomy, they won’t worry about mastering anatomy until you’ve gotten some basic aspects down. Gauge yourself, don’t be hard on yourself for not being able to jump from 1 to 100.
I see a lot of people who have trouble with these things because they aren’t aware of what progress they’ve already made, and they think whatever they’re not good at now must be some entirely new situation. If you do know how to sketch a face and hair, you already know how to draw thighs and rope. Learning how hair reflects light and shadows will already help you highlighting water, make connections, you’ve already made progress you just aren’t aware of.
If you’ve improved in one thing at least one bit, you’ve done something. Even if you feel like you haven’t, you’ve learned. Unfamiliar territory is just unfamiliar, it’s not absolutely foreign. Take it slow, it sucks, but once you get into this cycle, you won’t stop improving.