I've been practicing and reading a lot, and thought I might share some of the resources I've been lucky enough to have either stumbled across or recommended to me.

EBooks
If you read nothing else in your pursuit of art, read Loomis. I'm not just saying that because it's FREE (yes, FREE) but also because they are some of the best books on the subject of drawing out there. You can download PDFs of them here
http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/
You can also buy hardcopies for inexpensive on Amazon.com if that's more your thing.

Websites:
http://www.ctrlpaint.com/ for digital painting mostly but has some great tutorials that can be broadly applied
http://talesofamalthea.com/ Terryl Whitlatch's site on creature design

Blogs (too many to name, so a couple of my favorites):
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/ Gurney of Dinotopia fame's blog. Wonderful stuff =D
http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/ One of my favorite places to read for inspiration, kept by a number of professionals in creature design and concept art. So much to learn!

There are some awesome resources available on Youtube. Some of my favorites:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ProkoTV.....eature=g-all-u Proko, has several head tutorials using the Loomis method, and is currently doing a series on facial features.
http://www.youtube.com/user/fzdscho.....e=results_main Design School with Feng. Great stuff.

Gesture Tools
The first has some awesome tips to get you started. Gesturing is the #1 thing that will improve your art, I highly recommend giving it a try. After you have a bit of practice at that you can also try drawing from videos.
http://artists.pixelovely.com/pract.....igure-drawing/ Pixielovely--great layout and wonderful stuff, both people and animals
http://lovecastle.org/draw/ has some limited animal resources, has an engine for hands and faces which is helpful.

Lastly, as I am fairly far from most zoos, for animal subjects one of my favorite places to go to for videos to sketch from (remember the photos are copyrighted, you can copy for private practice but never for finished works. I recommend sketching from videos, you'll find you get a lot of life to your work):
https://www.arkive.org

I feel I would be remiss if I didn't mention all of the resources available at Conceptart.org. There's a lot of great advice and tutorials. The key is to not be too timid—there are some strong personalities on there. I recommend a lot of looking and listening to get the lay of the land before posting, some of the people can be a little harsh to newbies. Just be polite and don't let that discourage you.