It's great to hear that you have decided to work on your art skills from the very beginning by actively seeking critique and feedback. Just make sure to remember the purpose for which you joined art as you go along the journey, that is "Having Fun". Now with the feedback. The thing that i would suggest as the "First step" forna beginner would not be shading, or even figures. That's intermediate stuff you are jumping onto. For starters, we want to lay a strong foundation, a framework, that will let us learn all the other artistic skills easier. For staters, we wish to start with "Perspective" . The reason for this is that when you have a good perspective skills, you can actually "Understand" and breakdown the subject we draws, and easily build on top all other skills ad subordinate , such as shading , shape design , gesture and much more on top. On the contrary if we just jumps at other stuff from the beginning, we lacks the ability to truly "Understand" our subject, thus making us stuck with the reference or idea, in the same angle, the same gesture, the same shapes So if you wish to now learn more about perspective, and a full demonstration of what i said, make sure to check out artwod's free " Ultimate course for beginners " video available on youtube

@fosco

Paintover

Hello there! Welcome to this world! It’s completely normal to struggle with many things as a beginner, honestly, most things at first hehe. What I’d strongly recommend is focusing on fundamentals and temporarily setting aside more complex illustrations involving composition, color, lighting, etc. A lot of frustration early on comes from trying to do too much without the foundation to support it. At the beginning, perspective and form manipulation are key. These are the pillars of drawing. The human figure, for example, is mostly about structure, perspective, and form; learning muscles is maybe 20–30% of it. So it’s totally fine if, for now or this month, you just draw characters without backgrounds or complex lighting. Make your goal simply to construct a solid figure. If you can, I’d recommend checking structured learning paths like Artwod, or free resources like the YouTube channel from Stan Prokopenko, which has great playlists on figure drawing. Hope this helps, and keep at it!