Hello, I'll try my best to give some advice that might be helpful for you. I am crap at being concise, so, uh, sorry about that.
There's a Lot
The main thing about visual art is that it's a very branched out skill tree. There's a LOT of things to learn, depending on what you want to draw! Anatomy! Perspective! Gesture! Construction! Colors! Shading! Composition!-
When you look at people who amaze you with their art, they put a LOT of time and effort into it before that. Even the young-ish people who maybe make you feel like You can never do that or that you're too late. They probably were the type of kid who went home and drew all the time and figured out drawing With Purpose To Study as opposed to as just purely for fun pretty early.
That's simply a lot of knowledge and you Have to learn it gradually, over years, decades, slowly build up your knowledge and hone your muscle memory so that it all actually stays.
What That Means Learning-Wise
And of course that's a hard thing to realise. Everyone wants to improve Fast! You have ideas you want to create and the skills aren't There!
So you google tutorials, and you watch them, as you said. You watch a few of them. Or maybe more. If you try Once after every tutorial the technique that they show, it's already better than most watches.. I know I watched many without really putting pen to paper afterwards. Because people can be impatient, and when you Watch A Tutorial you feel like you learned something!
Sadly it's not enough and you really only learned the most shallow information from that watched-and-moved-on tutorial. Yes, tutorials ca help. Some can be huge thinking shifts that instantly make you Understand something new. I have a few like that! But to actually be able to use it in your drawings needs, I am sorry I know everybody heard this already, practice. You learn best by doing as some white haired witch would say, books can only teach you so much.
It doesn't mean 'don't watch any tutorials ever'. They can be helpful, at least the right kinds (i'll get to that). But you should treat them like a study book. You don't read a hsitory chapter for school Once and expect to ace the test. So, watch the tutorial. Maybe even a few times. Take notes if you want to. Now, go to your paper or other surface, and do the thing the tutorial teaches. A bunch of times. Notice what you still struggle with, compare with the video. What's lacking? Sometimes it's fast to figure out, sometimes it really takes a Bunch of time and tries.
I find that I Really learned something from a tutorial when I:
-can use the knowledge from it without having Just watched it
-morphed the advice to suit me. I am no longer parroting what the tutorial does exactly, I extracted what is helping me, and made it my own.
The second one I particularly notice with tutorials meant to help you simplify anatomy. I don't really do 100% of someone's way. It's a mix and match, whatever I Got on an instinctual level, some of my own stuff in there too. It helps to watch a variety of methods and see what sticks, for example a bunch of methods that people build the head with.
I sadly forgot who from artists over on youtube said this, but the gist of it was "you move on too fast to learn anything. you get frustrated that the thing you're learning doesn't look nice, so you jump over to learn a different thing, and jump again..- you need to accept that you'll be kind of crap at the thing for a while, and study one thing long enough to improve at it, to understand something new about it"
Sometimes it's really noticeable! One day you're scratching your head wondering what's wrong, the next one you look at your past sketches as can point out easily what needs fixing. +1 skill is there
