That stuffs hard!

This is what the non-programer says all the time when asked to program :P

Well said! I have always excelled with computers, code daily, but couldn't draw worth a damn! The past semester I took an art class expecting to see immediate improvement, I had the best attendance in the class, turned everything in and got a C. My mother is a children's book illustrator, you have it, or you don't. FML.

That stuffs hard!

Well, have to add a a disclaimer that either I was gifted with some art talent from the start (if you believe in such a thing), or I was just scribbling away in school books and on paper since I was a kid. I was never dedicated enough to really make it a profession (did try for art school, couldn't finish an assignement when I couldn't choose my own subject back then), but it was enough to make my grades dip from time to time when I spent more time drawing in class than listening to the teacher

Either way, I choose a technical career and became a programmer. Now, every few years, I would take up drawing again as a hobby, and during that times would fill notebooks with my mad scribbles, trying to get better at figure drawing, or comic drawing, or whatever I was feeling I was subpar at at the time.

Turned out my perfectionism together with my stubbornness, which had me fill notebook after notebook with drawings I was not really happy with did the trick. Today I think I am half decent at a lot of things that weren't my strength years ago.

There is no skill to drawing or art in general other than being able to decompose what you see and reproduce it on paper / on a computer. And these skills can be learned 100%... some might start at a higher level because of former training (like was the case with my skills with drawing technical stuff, which was all I drew as a kid), some have to start from zero (figure drawing for me... boy did I suck at age 20 with that, but when preparing for art school at age 13, that stuff was just too boring for me, I turned every figure drawing lesson into a lesson "how to draw a person as a monster"... lucky I was good at drawing monsters, and the models alway took it with humor... but you can see why I didn't got into art school ).

Do something long enough, and analyze the results to improve yourself, and you will in the end become good at it. Tackle it as you would tackle a new Programming language. You don't expect to master C++ in a single year, do you?

EDIT: Oh, and always find new and innovative ways to cheat. The difference between an amateur and a pro seems to be that the pro has numerous ways to cheat where the amateur invests sweat, tears and too much time... while the pro is already working on his next piece of work.

Never think that a crutch makes you a worse artist. Even the best artists from the middle ages used any crutch they could get (Camera obscura anyone), yet nobody calls them cheaters... after all how you create art doesn't matter, its just the result that matters.