ruby

I felt the same way you did but going thru drawabox and a couple of portrait books and courses really showed me that drawing can be as methodical as coding… it’s just about knowing what the steps are and what order to do them in. jill already mentioned drawabox so i want to recommend ** Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain**… it kinda blew my mind that following the exercises inadvertently made me do things i never thought i could without formal instruction or talent.

treat it like learning to play an instrument. there's room for expression when you're doing specific projects or doodling (in the musical analogy, playing songs or jamming), but the basic practice is more about learning the techniques and the use of drawing implements (read: how to play a note, how to tune your instrument, etc). i was gonna suggest some basic exercises but that drawabox suggestion from @oatmealine has a lot of what i'd suggest.

don't worry about visualization, most artists work from reference. it's extremely difficult to go from 0 real practice working from reference to just imagining something and transferring it to a page. once you have that practice, you get better at visualization just on the basis of remembering other times you've seen something like what you're visualizing and drawn it from reference.

also, if you're in the US you probably have a community college nearby that offers art classes, which you might be able to audit for cheap if you're not interested in a degree. they have the advantage of having a teacher and a lot of the workshop space and equipment for life drawing which would otherwise be both difficult and expensive to acquire.