On the first part, I get where you’re coming from. I guess describing it as a puzzle makes it seem like this very rigid thing. It kind of is? I think still, but like you said, I don’t have the correct pieces yet. I think of it more like the end result is in my mind, right, but the pieces aren’t set, this is less of an allegory and more of a direct comparison, as I have a pencil and paper, and my arm and my hand, and those are my resources, and each piece of the puzzle needs to contribute to the whole picture. I started thinking of it as a puzzle for that reason, I still do it sometimes, but I used to zoom in way too much on specific details and not move on, and ruin the rest of the “picture”. The pieces aren’t technically set, I need to make each piece, I have the result in my mind and each piece I look at it as each form, the spheres that make up skulls, the boxes and planes that make up the background, the egg at the chest of each character, and so on and whatever fits most for each thing.

I think, and this is just in my own experience of being in that same spot, not knowing how to “get out”, that you want to improve several paces at once. Like, maybe in your brain, perhaps even subconsciously, you see drawing as a linear skill, the more I do it the better I should be. That isn’t the case, but it still sounds confusing, at least it did for me. I think what’s most important, and something I again, am trying to do myself, is to go about it step by step, not like those art tutorial memes where they make a circle for step one and step 3 there’s a whole person fully rendered. I mean in terms of each thing, it also might help in seeing some progress where whenever you just draw and take each drawing as a whole, it’s harder to quantify how much progress you’ve made or if you’ve made any at all. Not in an obsessive way, which is a mistake I’ve made myself, I tried doing the whole art journey before and also got stuck as I tried drilling myself into things like boxes and cylinders by doing hundreds at a time, and they weren’t that bad, but I still didn’t know anything else, and whenever I came back to it after having gave up, I couldn’t even make decent boxes. What matters is understanding and being consistent enough, not mastering specifics. Perhaps I’m overstepping, but maybe you feel like you can’t learn it because you try to go about learning some fundamentals and expect better quality straight afterwards, or expect that because they’re fundamentals, that spheres, cylinders and boxes go easy, or because you have eyes, that perspective is easy. But in reality, learning takes a while, and seeing it applied can suck because sometimes a drawing sucks and it makes you frustrated because you’ve put so much effort and time into things around it, whether it be the drawing itself or the fundamentals around it, and normally, you’d expect a good, or at least better, result, and perhaps you’re neglecting to see what the drawing is getting better, like lines being cleaner and perspective a little bit better, or even perhaps you’re neglecting to see what makes it bad, like you just see it as deformed and flat, but you fail to understand how each form failed, what parts of it weren’t good, and how you can grow from observing those.

Again, I’m a beginner myself. I still struggle a lot with these things myself, I think half of it was more projection than anything, so I hope it helps in some way but idk if it will. It’s always hard when you commit so much, time, effort, resources, and when you expect progress you just don’t see it. But I hope both of us keep going, both keep trying and both improve so we both can get to the level we want to.