BTW past the basics, drawing is basically KNOWING. If you don't know what to draw it will come out badly and flat, so the more you know (using reference, experimentation and observation) the better you will draw.
BY knowing I mean two things:
1. INTENTION (what to draw)
Things that is in the brain, your visual literacy, anything you will memorize, shape, details, etc ... and use to compose new form. Basically the "eyes", your capacity to see, and what you know is what you see.
2. EXECUTION (how to draw)
The muscle memories, instinct in drawing, "feeling" the form when you draws it. This need constant tuning and maintenance, it decays faster than 1. You end up frustrated because your eyes si out of sync.
You can see a lot of beginner trying to run before walking, they generally end up frustrated or hit a sweet spot between frustration and enjoyment at a fixed level. For example the reason I tell Conker to step up his works is because I see he enjoy drawing (moe blob) character (enjoyment) but don't want to put up with the frustration, he might get stuck at that level and never really improve at all.
I know because I got stuck when I switch to game design.
This image makes two points:
1st point is that this image is 10 years old (or more) so I haven't improve since.
2nd is that it demonstrate how KNOWING impact your drawing, the left drawing I had no idea what I was doing, it's a design exercise as it mixed different known character visual into one, the right image is way better in composition, proportion, poses and env ... that's because I now know what I'm doing and not thinking about it, I just execute and personality flows much more.
That's why noob get stuck at face and profile too, that's what they know best, they know where the line goes, how an eyes should looks, what are the ratio between elements, add perspective and rotation and all of that goes to waste, it's a local maxima.
That's why you need to train into the both ways, intuition and executions, by looking at varied references, and training muscle to retain all of it.
Conclusion
1. Don't get stuck at bad drawing, there are just prototype and looking at them should make you confident at where to look at for improvement (assuming you know what you are looking for), so just continue to learn.
2. train, never stop and increase your literacy and execution, keep the eyes and the hand in sync. Training should be as mindless as possible, it's about lifting the weight until it weight nothing, it's as straightforward as that. Just repeat as much as possible. Zone out on it. Just do it.
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