yeah, i feel the same way. I could copy the things he's doing and make them look decent, maybe even as good as he does with some practice but using those basics to create my own designs? Magic. I'm a creative person when it comes to certain things but with this type of visual art i just don't get it for whatever reason.

I think the key (and I'm saying this as a fulltime programmer), is to learn how to see things as an artist. I had a fantastic art teacher my last year of high school, and for a month or two, I think I understood how to look at things in a different way. I have two drawings and a painting from those few months, and they're some of my favorite possessions.

I've since forgotten how I managed do make them, but I think that's largely from a lack of practice.

I feel a similar way when trying to learn something new that looks/feels like magic. The tutorials are simple enough and give awesome results but for some reason I don't get it. After much practice eventually something clicks and it turns out that there was no magic, it really is as simple as claimed.

I think that it seems like magic to us because our brain refuses to believe that it is that simple. But specially because we lack the practice. After much practice eventually a threshold is reached and the brain decides that you've been exposed to enough patterns and nothing else is left to learn and that is when "it just clicked" happens. At least that is what I think is happening. Your brain is protecting you from claiming you've learned something new without enough practice.

If you want to draw cool cartoon characters that aren't just precise copies of an online tutorial, pick up a pencil and draw a person from life. It'll suck, but do it in earnest a few dozen times, and pretty soon you'll have an idea of how to distort reality into cartoons.

These tutorials are the end result of a lot of invisible rule-breaking (a nose looks like x, a hand looks like y, etc.). You can't break these rules intelligently unless you know what they are. And since everyone has access to reality and a pencil, there's nothing preventing anyone from discovering the rules.

This is the biggest hurdle for those with a 'I can't draw a stick figure if my life depended on it' attitude. Hand drawing takes a lot of practice and determination to get past the initial 'this looks like sh' stages..

I agree with you as far as the experience and the analysing of shapes goes... and yes... the next step after reading the tutorials should be to go and play with the shapes and create something new, experiment and find your own way of doing things. From some of the feedbacks I received that is happening for quite a few users that go through the steps and then turn the simple circles into an owl, a tiger or a dragon. Something they would not have created from scratch with pen and paper as they lacked the self esteem and believe in their art creation skill.

I tried to go a different way in the tutorials to give the readers a simple approach towards 'constructing' elements from basic building blocks - rather than struggle with perspective and proportion.