I got a book for Christmas, Figure Drawing Without a Model, and it really packs a lot of helpful info into a pretty slim book. The best thing is that it tells you what you need to do in order to be able to draw the human figure well using just your imagination, something that books on cartooning and illustration tend to gloss over ("just draw this circle and that circle, and then these lines with these circles connecting them . . ."), and books on learning "serious drawing" tell you not to do (they often imply that you should only draw from life). The first "exercise" is to just practice drawing from life as much as possible, using a sketchbook as a journal, so that you memorize the human figure subconsciously. This is very hard for me, because I'm afraid of being caught drawing by my subject, and too shy to tell my subject I'm going to sketch them (Plus, since I'm starting with my family, I'm worried it'll be a big deal. Even now that I'm grown up, I'm still the baby, and subject to everyone's interest in my every move.)

I've been sketching my parents when I can do so surreptitiously, and my husband too. Other than that, I'm just getting back into practice by drawing people from magazine pages, which isn't the best but will have to do for now. My sketches all suck, hehe. I didn't realize how long it had been since I'd tried my hand at realistic drawing, and you can certainly tell. I feel almost like I'm starting over, but I think to improve my work I'm going to have to really get the basics down, something I was too impatient to do before. Hopefully before long I'll be practiced enough to sketch in a park or café. I'll post updates on my progress here from time to time, but I'm not sure when I'll have any work decent enough to actually submit. Not too long, I hope.