The best thing about the internet is that you can use it to teach yourself anything for free. Heres all that I used to teach myself realistic drawing, all free!

Learn to Draw (Devon Delaney) | Linktree

Motivation

Teachers

Finding References

SSavaArt (YouTube)

Scott is a primarily watercolor artist that's had a very successful art career and has since built a platform where he shows his art and talks about the art process, morality, things going on in his daily life, and many similar topics. A lot of the appeal in his content comes from his transparency with how he feels while creating and how he values kindness both to others and yourself. Scott will tell you when he struggles with a peice, will tell you when he hates his work, and then share how he tries to keep moving despite it. It's honest and realistic but still optimistic and hearing about his struggles in the art process even after being as good as he is and working as professionally as he has helped me and how I view my art, over time swaying me to be kinder to myself and trust that my inner critic's assesments are always harsher than any outsider's thoughts. 

Scott's YouTube is linked below, and links to all his other sites (Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, etc) are on his page.

Scott Christian Sava

JakeDontDraw (Youtube)

JakeDontDraw is an oil painter who focuses on realism and understanding old masters (think portraits of historical figures). His painterly approach and focus on understanding the forms and value placement in your drawings helped my art a lot, and he's the main reason why I tried learning again. Both his short form and long form content are helpful and you don't have to watch every video to understand his approach (i certainly haven't). I do recommend sitting with and actively paying attention to whichever video you pick, trying to understand what he's saying and see how you can apply it to how your brain works. I started with a better grasp of 3d than 2d due to practice with sculpting and an understanding of the human form through fitness, so thats probably why it clicked so well for me. regardless of your experience with 3d understanding though, understanding the forms you're drawing is in general a common idea in advancing your art and Jake's explanations will be valuable.

Jake Don't Draw 

Angel Ganev (Youtube Shorts)

I'm less familiar with Angel in general, but his YouTube Shorts starting with "Can we improve this drawing?" were also helpful to me in understanding forms and specifically color and lighting. These shorts mostly focus on semi-realistic portraits in Angel's style, and the main benefit is how he explains simply and quickly what forms he's seeing and what logic is behind the lighting and coloring in the drawings. 

These shorts work great as an extension of JakeDontDraw's videos as they share focus on form fundamentals while covering different specific areas. 

"fix your drawing" videos can be useful for developing your critical eye to better see why your art looks off to you, but it can also be discouraging, so there's no shame in avoiding them if they're not for you.

"Can We Improve This Drawing" guy (Angel Ganev)

You're a smart cookie and you know how to fuck around and find out. Even though this method may feel frustrating because you don't have an outside teacher to guide you, there's a lot of value in using your own judgement to figure out how to improve.

You'll just have to be careful with your inner critic here. They can be useful to you when they help you find things that just look "off" in your art, but they can be a dangerous demotivator if you take their input as gospel. When examining your own art for things that don't look right, ONLY listen to very specific critisism and look at every "off" feeling as a symptom you need to find the source of. the legs dont look right? check with your reference and ask is it the proportions, does it look like they're facing the wrong way, is the joint doing something joints cant do?

I'd avoid starting right out with this one, but it's great for practicing what you learn from these other teachers, it builds your brain up to be your own teacher!

Yourself!

Gesture Drawing Online (YouTube)

Gesture Drawing Online is a YouTube channel that provides videos of various adult covered models in unique poses. Most videos have two or more pose options on screen at a time. The videos stay on poses for defined amounts of time (with countdowns and few second breaks in between timers). These timers are short with the purpose that you practice quick gesture drawing (sketching out the post in broad general shapes to captured the movement and feeling quickly) but videos can be paused to use the references as long as you need.

i do definitely recommend them for gesture drawing because of how easy they make it to practice. just go to the channel, pick a 30 minute video, and practice. the limited amount of references per video makes it easy to plan and set a goal, and two+ references on screen lets the videos be used more than once.

Gesture Drawing Online (Youtube)

Line-Of-Action.com

Line Of Action is a website that offers free reference resources of full body people (figures), human faces, human hands, animals, and landscapes

Line Of Action (Website)