>>5899548"Just draw" is a shitty meme spread by beginners who want to convince themselves real work is unnecessary. It's true that you'll probably improve to some degree by "just drawing", but you'll also find that years later you've improved less than you could have from just a few months of dedicated studying and practice.
I would say actual practice means doing things that serve a deliberate purpose, focused attempts to improve your skills. Stuff like mechanical exercises (training your ability to draw straight lines, circles, ellipses, etc.), practicing perspective, gesture drawings, anatomy studies, basically anything that you're mentally present for that has a specific goal to it. Doesn't have to be something that's typically thought of as one of the fundamentals, either - Maybe your drawings lack emotion so you spend time working on facial expressions. The important thing is that when you're doing this kind of practice you're really thinking about it and trying to improve your skills while you're doing it, you're analyzing things and actively trying to learn.
If you're mentally checked out and just going through the motions then you're not going to benefit from it, and I think that some beginners probably make that mistake and then get frustrated because their work isn't paying off. Making the same mistakes over and over again for 4 hours isn't going to help you improve, this isn't some shitty JRPG where you can mindlessly grind until you level up. It'd be nice if it were that simple, but it's not and thinking that way is a bad trap that leads to people giving up because they think their lack of results means they aren't cut out for drawing. We're all capable of making it, but doing so requires the right approach. No point crying over lost time though, so if you feel like you've wasted months or years on "just drawing" let the past go and focus on the present and future.
