I figured I'd come in here to cheer myself up, but that doesn't even work.
What I need help with the most is getting over that initial hurdle of stopping with half-finished exercises and starting to really try to make something, and it really fucking wears on me that I never see the jump from 0 to 1.
This thread has plenty of people who went from 1 or 2 out of 10 to a straight 8, but what I haven't seen at all in all my time here is someone, anyone, who went from 0 to 1.
Even
>>3190574 last year was at 1. This is what's considered the worst of the worst of the worst, below the level that most Loomis exercises are targeted towards, and when I see that, I start wanting to kill myself.
How do you get over the hurdle that even the newest, even the most talentless and the most intentionally lazy and incompetent people eclipse you through barely anything more than a wave of the pen? I'm getting told every single time that "you don't have to be afraid of failure, you just have to learn the fundamentals and draw", but that's advice aimed towards people who already know how to draw, just not draw well.
It seems that everything I look at, even the most shamelessly beginner-pandering guides and condescending advice, assume that you have some level of artistic skill in the first place, or otherwise, like Loomis, it just goes from "draw a ball" to "now draw faces and hair and glasses and shadows from an angle".
Jesus fucking Christ, I know I have low self-confidence but someone else must have been blocked by this too.