some of the things I’ve learned about making art recently:

you should make your art in stages, trying to do all the parts as you go will make it way harder to get a good looking image and tends to make things messy

• shaping, make a bunch of ovals or other simple shapes to outline the general shape of what you want to draw

• outlining, draw the outline of the main parts of the thing you’re drawing, unless you need to make a really long straight line, avoid using the line tool and mainly use the pencil

• coloring, add the base colors of the different parts of your drawing, and stick to some kind of pallette, throwing in a bunch of random colors usually doesn’t look good

• detailing, add the smaller parts and details to your drawing

• shading, add shadows to the drawing, the lighting should come from off page unless you have a light source in the drawing, light coming down from an angle looks much better than just straight down

using good references can help a ton, as they can help you correct your mistakes, just avoid tracing because then you’re just copying someone else’s art.

this definitely isn’t perfect advice, but I find that these can help a lot and I hope it can help other people who want to improve at art too.