I think one piece of advice in that article is actually terrible, specifically:
The first mistake a programmer will make is to think that his or her ugly sprite will get better by just continuing to work on it. It won't! If it starts out bad, it stays bad.
This is exactly the opposite of true. Now, I'm not going to win any art awards any time soon, but I can paint passably, in Photoshop or what-have-you, objects that are at least recognizable and more or less accurate, if not incredibly artistic. A year ago or so, I hadn't picked up a pencil to draw in like fifteen years.
My first attempts were seriously, seriously awful, and I had no idea what to do, so I downloaded a ton of Gnomon Workshop DVDs and spent hours just watching people work. And the first thing I noticed was that even paintings by incredibly skilled, professional artists go through a stage of looking like sketchy crap: wobbly lines, blurry bits, highlights floating off into space, whatever. The artists I was watching didn't seem remotely troubled by this fact. When it came up in the commentary, mostly they talked about how they weren't focusing at all on line or details, just trying to get compositional elements down, figure out the tonal range of the painting, etc.
I was to learn, and to this day I have no idea why art tutorials don't feature this as a preface in giant letters, that art is really a process, and the big thing that separates those who can't draw from those who can is that when the people who can't draw are finishing a blurry mess of a painting and saying to themselves, "I guess maybe this looks better than my last attempt," people who can draw are just warming up.
Now, I'm not trying to suggest I've uncovered all the secrets of awesome painting, and I'm certainly not trying to suggest that the only thing that makes art good or bad is time (I will probably never draw like the Gnomon Workshop guys, no matter how much work I put into it), but basically overnight I went from being unable to draw a recognizable cube to drawing to relatively complex surfaces, basic human figures, and simple scenes correctly lit and in perspective.
Every time I see someone post something to the art forum or whatever where they're like "OH HAI GUYS I DRAW THIS PICTURE" and it looks like an out of focus shot of leftover Thai food, I can't help but think that they dropped down some colours, played around with brushes for half an hour, and then gave up because it looked like crap and they figured they couldn't draw.
Seriously, in many cases it's as simple as "if it looks bad, you aren't finished." If I were to open up the Chris Whitman School for Kids Who Can't Draw Good (and Want to Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too), the first lecture would be:
1. Finish your painting.
2. Don't worry about making mistakes. Short of switching off Undo and viciously attacking a finished, photoreal masterwork with a lime-green, star-shaped brush, it's very difficult to make uncorrectable mistakes.
3. Finish your painting!
4. Pay attention. The only time I find myself seriously wasting time is when I'm just not paying attention. Like I'll spend an hour meticulously rendering a fully-detailed 1920s automobile only to realize it wasn't in perspective. If you stay focused, pay attention and try to keep everything at the same level of doneness, you will eventually make something good.
5. FINISH YOUR FUCKING PAINTING.
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