how would I learn to draw?

I've had a bunch of jobs doing "art" professionally, and I honestly believe that the ability to draw is a learned skill and not necissarily an innate talent.

Where most people have trouble when doing a realistic drawing is in scale and proportion, and that's because humans have a tendency to interpret an image based on patterns and recognition of an image as a whole, instead of a series of lines and shapes. So when you draw something that is out of proportion, it's very easy to tell that it looks "wrong" but it's difficult to tell why...if that makes sense.

There's a couple of tricks to help with this problem.

First of all, when you start off- it's much easier to replicate a two-dimensional image than it is to replicate a three dimensional image, so you might want to begin with drawing from photos rather than life studies.

When you're first learning proportion, it helps to enlarge an image and put it on a grid, that way you can focus on each "square" rather than the whole image, and your replicating a series of lines rather than your idea of what an image should look like (for example, most people draw a human eye without actually looking at the shape- they recognise symmetry and tend to draw a "football" shape, where as the human eye is symmetrical along an x/y axis but more in a parallelogram shape).

Also, it can help to flip a picture upside down before you draw it, that way you focus on the lines rather than the totality of the image itself.

You can use other tricks, like measuring the scale with a pencil eraser.

Having said that, there's so much fantastic art that isn't exactly representational or lifelike or proportional...Picasso, Matisse, Klimt, etc etc...don't get hung up on your drawings being super realistic; that can limit your creativity.

If you have any other questions, I'm all over this thread. I used to teach art classes, and I MISS it :(!!