@Whistle Blossom
When it comes to improving your work, I personally believe that being able to effectively reflect on the quality of your art
while being honest to yourself is the biggest thing, followed by knowing what you’re aiming for style wise, and then followed by being able to take good critique and act on it.
With that being said, I’ve taken a look at some of your art on Derpi. Here’s what I think Whistle: the biggest thing you need to work on is anatomy and line quality. The lines for both your digital and traditional stuff are
very wavy, and because it’s present in your traditional work where line instability caused by the program/tablet isn’t a factor, that tells me that it’s just your hand being quite shaky. Practice drawing freehand lines and curves in order to build up the muscle memory needed to be able to draw smoothly.
For anatomy, I can’t be of much help since I primarily draw anthro ponies but there’s plenty of good refs for feral pony anatomy around. The last piece of advice I can give to you specifically is to not underestimate the importance of
construction. It’s something that I think a lot of artists overlook, and if I had to take a guess at why, they might think it’s not relevant to them because they don’t intend to do perspective drawing. Don’t do that, it’s almost always relevant, especially for characters.
Just take things step by step so that you don’t overwhelm yourself. Focus on improving one aspect of your art at a time.
@HumanoSiniestro
Some people say the references are useless or they make you someone dependent of them. But is not true, they could be truly useful for someone without experience with the anatomy, especially if you want to draw ponies or humans.
References are always useful, but I think the one thing that people forget to mention alongside this point is that when you’re looking at a reference, you should be aiming to
reconstruct what you see, not copying what you see. When you have the mindset of reconstructing a reference, you’re analysing things on a deeper level rather than just taking what you see at face value.
@HumanoSiniestro
Also, I recommend to use ClipStudio® Paint, is a better software than Paint Tool SAI®, and is avaliable in MacOS, not only in Windows.
A tool is only as good as the person who uses it, but once you reach the point where you know what you’re doing for the most part, better tools can help you produce better results. I started out with Medibang, but I eventually tried out both CSP and SAI. I preferred CSP, and once I got used to it, I noticed that my shading improved due to better blending tools, and lineart was much less painful to do because of the vector line editing tools it has which allow you to adjust your lines after you drawn them.