I don't know how everyone else's experiences are like, but since I'm in a bit of a writing mood I feel like writing something about how it's like to just learn on your own, and still be learning. When you start you can be overwhelmed with what you have to do and then as time progresses you don't notice your advancement. I think it's worth reading, I guess. I may not be totally professional, but it's been a pretty long way.

It begins in the first stage, when you’re just introduced to the artwork done by others. Let’s say you found out about the fandom while you were browsing around a forum where a friend or members shows a bit of his love for his fursona, which would lead you to art sites like deviantART, SheezyArt, Newgrounds, etc. You're fascinated, you're curious because you've had this interest hiding inside you. The one little thing that whenever mentioned you would instantly turn your attention to it. You go around the site, even make an account, and probably come up with an identity that hints at your interest or the hiding imaginary friend you will soon have. As time passes you discover this entire interest has a name: Furry Fandom. Something clicks, something tells you this is something about you, you have some kind of way to express yourself completely differently than you could ever imagine. You can express yourself as some kind of animal, as something completely different from you, but that is so much more about you than you can express in your real life. You come up with an identity, a fursona, an imaginary expression of yourself. Sadly, all you have is a description. So you go around looking for pictures on the internet, for anything that can look remotely similar. However your efforts mostly end up fruitless. After browsing so much artwork, you realize how amazing and how lively some artwork looks. You discover how some great artists can draw for their friends, yet your attempts to befriend an artist doesn't turn out as planned, nor do you have a way to pay them to draw what you want. You get frustrated, and you're angered at how you don't have the skill to develop such artwork. Your fursona yearns for coming to light; for getting out there in the world, and all you want is to allow that to happen. After all of that frustration, you have an idea, a crazy idea.
Night falls, you sneak to the printer and steal a few sheets of paper, you scurry to your room, you grab a pencil and an eraser from your school supplies and attempt to do something you were told by your teachers you were incapable of doing yourself: You draw. You draw and enter stage two: the real beginning.
As you draw, you find it extremely difficult. You can almost hear the voice of you fursona in your head telling you how they're having a great time, a certain experience they had in your imaginary world. Every trace is slow, yet steady. Keeping focused you finally draw a shape, a shape of an animal. You keep going, and going. Traces are scratched on the paper. Lines are drawn. Yet with every attempted scratch and trace there are 3 moments needed to use the eraser. You probably have a wrinkled paper and your bed is filled with eraser shavings, but you keep going because your fursona is showing you so many great things to you about them. You probably even add color and remark the outline. And then, you're finally finished, you finally drew the picture, you finally drew your fursona. And yet the clock reads so many hours past midnight, so you fall asleep with your excitement.
When morning arrives, you wait for the biggest moment of your artistic history to come. You wait for the perfect moment, and secretly snatch a digital camera, head to your room and focus it on your drawing. After several blurry shots you capture the perfect one, and swiftly go to the computer hoping you won't get caught. You wait impatiently for the image to upload to the computer. Once the heartstopping moment surpasses, you quickly remove evidence of the image ever touching the camera by deleting the photos on it. Then the last task comes in, and you do so. You log on to your account on your artsite, and you upload the image. You make it clear that it is your fursona. You suddenly feel a sense of pride pass across you mind. You even feel like your own fursona is proud of you. However, there is still so much to come.
You find you have only had only a handful of views, and not even a single favorite or comment, you try to show it to others in other websites, but still not much attention. You're later told by a more experienced user the countless mistakes you made. You're criticized and ridiculed by your rea l-life friends by your apparently horrid drawing. "What the hell is that?!" you hear the most among them. You feel crushed, you feel like something inside of you just died. All of those efforts thrown away, "Maybe I shouldn't keep doing this..." you say to yourself, until you hear a voice telling you, "No, keep trying. You won't get anywhere if you stop now." So you take the advice, and attempt to draw more every night. Suddenly, you have an apparent sleeping problem, yet that doesn't stop you since coffee becomes an ally. Many of your works never see the light of day, but you still draw. As you draw, you come up with so many possibilities and ideas for your fursona. Maybe they live in a city, or maybe they control a world of their own! Maybe they have a skill? Ability? You try to draw them, yet you still feel so limited.
As days go by, your gallery fills with a couple of new submissions still with the same quality of your first, you still see yourself stuck below everyone else. You see other artists' work with the clean lines, the flawless anatomy, the beautiful coloring, and the amazing shading. Even the cartoony artists have something you couldn't even dream of. "What is it?" you think to yourself, "why can't I have that flawlessness?" All of these artists seem to have some kind of gift of creating such great things, gathering so much attention, and you can't even make your drawings' colors show in the camera. Even your viewcount still sags below 30.
At this point, you find yourself frustrated. You try to draw regularly, but you can’t keep up. So you think of anything. After all, you need to make your profile grow. So you take photos, you make random things, you even take photos of things that you could call ‘abstract art’. You upload them to your account, thinking that new submissions could mean more attention. It only works a little, giving you 1 favorite in total, and a few 10 new views.
Then comes a special day, as you have been attempting to draw, to show your fursona, to show yourself in the form of artwork, you have suddenly become a fan of an artist. Surprisingly, they have such great work, and yet they have made so little attention. This artist has the time of talking to anyone, and has even taken the time to have some conversations with you. Without realizing, you gain the luck of knowing somebody with experience. You shy out from selfishly
asking them to draw something for you, but instead, ask for advice. You ask them why they draw so great, why they have such great things, and they tell you the echoing advice from every artist, “practice.” However, they even point to you to avoid pesky “How to draw X character” books and tell you to learn real art: Anatomy, perspective, figures, shapes. You disappointingly take the advice expecting they’d have said some sort of secret that there was to learn.
One day, as you pass by a bookstore you find a number of books about drawing anatomy, about drawing animals from a detailed point of view. The artist’s advice echoes across your mind, and with the little money you have you buy them. At this point you hit stage three.
You read through the books, you find so many useful tips, and you learn a lot. Many days pass by as you attempt to practice the many things you learn from the books. The books suddenly become your go-to reference. They hold so many mindblowing lessons about drawing: How a tree’s branches can be drawn, how perspective can simply base itself on a single point on the set horizon, how characters can be drawn with guidelines rather than from the outline. You slowly advance, you messily draw, but this time you have more of a clue on what you are doing. You look now at actual photographs of animals, specifically the species of your fursona. After countless attempts, you suddenly got it. You drew the animal that is much more recognizable than any other time you have ever tried. You gain another sense of pride and you get more ideas.
You still however, consider yourself in your learning stages. Your artwork rate can be counted at 1 submission per month or even 2 months, due to so much tediousness from working the camera. As you keep drawing you still can’t get past the fact how bad they look when you upload them. Even when the day comes that you obtain a scanner, sure you’ve gained much more crisp images, but somehow they still don’t have such vibrant colors like other artists. Oddly though, you gain a few unexpected favorites from strangers, and your fursona now seems to have become more of a real person rather than just an imaginary talking animal.
As time progresses you draw more, you learn more, and you even have an entire world constructed in your mind for you to pick and place what you want. Sadly, not everything is drawable, even with your hardest attempts, and your great artist friend has become too popular to help you anymore. Yet, you’ve discovered something new that you could use. Something absolutely amazing and that every artist seems to possess: a graphics tablet.
More time goes by as you save up money for a decent table you have been keeping your eye on. You are absolutely certain that you can draw much better once you get it. All of that excitement accumulates to the very day you obtain it. Once you do, you think of all of the possible things you could do. So many ideas, so many drawings, you can finally have that amazing clean looking style you’ve been wanting! “Drawing on the computer with a mouse was a nightmare, but with this, it’ll be a breeze!” You say to yourself.
After some painstaking setups, and installation of a number of drivers and software, you break out the program, and your first thoughts about the experience: It’s weird, it’s different. After a number of efforts you draw a head, or maybe a face. You color…rather messily. It’s such a strange experience but you find your way around. You make something simple, and it feels like you just made something so much more professional. It makes it on your profile, but as you look at other artists it still looks like it doesn’t match what you want. However, you set out to figure out what’s wrong, and so you look for resources, entering stage four.
You read tutorials, you find software that’s more suited for your needs, you even set your tablet to work more efficiently. You realize how different it is to work digitally than it was with your pencil and paper technique. You discover the magic of layers, the ways you can use a few brushes and how some simple options can help you greatly. All of this learned from streams and speedpaints of the handful of experienced friends you’ve made, or of the bigger artists you’ve become a fan. All of this in the same time as you practice these very skills. Your workflow suddenly moves more swiftly, yet as you progress you can’t seem to fight off the idea that you aren’t as good as you want to be. So you draw more, and more, and more, and more. You continuously draw, learning different techniques, different ways of preparing sketches, new ways to draw figures, new types of anatomy, you even learn how to draw anything other than your own fursona. You join in trades, you participate in live collabs, you even sometimes take requests. During this time you suddenly gain friends, you suddenly don’t care at all about popularity. You just want to show your best side. Yet there is still the same thought that lingers across your mind: you’re not as good as you want to be. You still don’t think you’re a great artist. Sure, you’ve increased you pageviews way past 3,000 and yeah, you have more than fifty followers, and ok, your last submission just got 8 favorites, but still…you can’t really call your own art amazing. It all progresses all the way until hitting stage five.
More time passes, you draw more, you fursona loves you, and you love your fursona. From time to time, you fall into an artblock but somehow escape it. You keep on going while balancing the many things going on in your real life. You know how to draw, you can even draw something quickly right out of your mind. You’re followers are increasing, you do understand that your artwork is nice. You’ve even had quite a shock when you looked back at your first drawing. You know your way around the fandom since you’ve been there long enough….



…and then a young user comes to you asking for advice on drawing.

_{TL;DR: It's all about practice and enjoying it. Improvement almost feels invisible.}