I don't understand how to learn drawing. Nobody is able to explain in concrete terms how to learn drawing. I sit there with a book on drawing people and I don't get what I'm supposed to do.

>just copy the sketches that are in the book
I can do that, and I may even be okay at it, but it doesn't make me better. You can sit there and copy a great book in your own handwriting word-for-word, but that doesn't make you a good author or even improve your writing skills, it just makes you a better copier

>don't just copy what you see, but try to learn the forms and break the shapes down
okay but HOW? I see authors do this shit all the time, like it's some breakthrough discovery that nobody ever thought of. For example they will say something like, "The hand can be broken down into simple shapes, such as boxes and cylinders" and then they throw in a few sketches of a hand. Somehow I am expected to take that information, without any further instructions, and just start producing sketches of hands.

Yes, I understand a hand, or any other piece of anatomy, can be broken down into simpler shapes. So what the fuck am I supposed to DO with that information? I can draw a box. I can draw a cylinder. But I still don't know how the fuck to draw a hand, a head, or an arm in such a way that it looks real. There's a gap of information there that nobody can explain how to bridge. It seems like people just expect you to intuitively understand something deeper about this whole process but it's always been a mystery to me.