I'm going through a serious learning phase right now and I thought I'd share some the things I do to try and progress my skills a bit.


1. Know what you'd like to improve on. Try to keep it to one thing at a time.

2. I start by looking on here for works I consider better than mine, and that have a quality I want my work to have (people I'm jealous of! ).

3. Then I look to see if any of these people have tutorials or 'stages' of their work and study them a bit.

4. Google and Youtube! I spend hours looking up 'photoshop realism' tutorials and there's a ton of them out there for almost anything you could want. This is probably the longest step for me - I can look at these things for weeks before attempting anything myself.

5. I'll start searching for good reference material. You need large clear pictures that show a lot of detail.

6. I'll wait until I feel good about drawing (sometimes I'm really not in the mood) and then pick one thing I really want to draw so that I'm as excited about it as I can be (at the moment I have decided in fit of nerdy-fan-girl-madness that I have to draw at least one picture of Desmond Miles)

7. Have you're reference open and begin to draw! Don't feel bad if it goes badly and if you get frustrated at all just stop. Come back to it when you feel positive.



It's not easy, keep trying and you should see steady progress.
Eventually you'll suddenly realise you're a lot better than when you started. There are a lot of really good tutorials here on Deviantart, just select 'All time' in the tutorial section and browse until you see something useful.

Hope some of this helps even if it is really obvious stuff. Just wanted to encourage people to try.

Good luck!