Forum posts by Dfish

I'm glad I could help.
Also, consider the analogy of language. You layer your skills like you layer language skills. Jumping too far ahead of your current skill is like trying to spell difficult words when you struggle with memorizing the alphabet.

When you're really struggling with some element of drawing, ask yourself: What are the ABC's of this skill? -or- What is the most basic unit of this skill?

Having a solid mental representation for proper proportion—meaning, you know it like your ABC's—would make learning anatomical forms(muscles, etc.) much easier for you. For example, when trying to learn musculature, having the ability to lay in perfect proportions for a human effortlessly, would allow you to focus more acutely on developing your mental representations for various muscles. Maybe you wouldn't nail the perfect curve to capture the bicep every time or your abdominal muscles might be a bit off, but everything would be proportioned right—the arms wouldn't be too short for the body and the torso wouldn't be too long. Remember, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

Good Luck.

You are describing a lack of "mental representations" for anatomy/proportion.
Think of how you can close your eyes in your bedroom and navigate while generally knowing where objects are even though you can't see anything. That's a mental representation—it's an abstract feeling.

When you have solid mental representations with regard to anatomy/proportion, and you begin to draw a figure, you can "feel" the rest of the drawing as soon as you draw the head, for instance.

How do you acquire this? Deliberate practice. You draw, look at your failure, fix it, and repeat over and over and over again. Emphasis on deliberate. Avoid mindless lines—be deliberate and think about what you are specifically trying to get better at before each line you create.

Also, shrink your goals and lower your bar for what you consider a "win." Work on getting the hips in proportion with the head—if you that closer than what you have before, it's a win. You're filling out a map in your head, 1 subgoal at a time. Eventually, it will be effortless for you, and you'll be able to move on to even more complex things.

It's a frustrating journey, but it works.