Wow, it's weird seeing people who profess to being bad at drawing people. I think I need to get out more

I'm at my best and entirely in my comfort zone drawing most people. Big people, small people, humanoid not-quite-people (satyrs, fairies, ogres etc). It's how I've wired my brain because I draw them so much.

It is mostly about time spent. I've drawn animals/monster and plants since I was in elementary school, so that's what I'm most comfortable with. Both people and architecture/perspective/machinery are more challenging for me because I started later. Though, I do think people are a subject where audiences are hypersensitive to small errors because our brains evolved to pay minute attention to the appearances of those around us, both their emotions and the health/age/ethnicity, etc. When drawing monsters I'm much less likely to hear comments on details like where the eyes are placed in the face, or comments that a supposedly masculine animal looks too feminine, but I hear that kind of thing all the time (and have said it myself) about drawings of people.

There are two faculties that contribute to drawing well. They're heavily interdependent but in many ways seperate too. (1) is eye. (2) is hands.

(1) is the ability to look at the world in 3D, or visualize it when drawing from imagination, and project what you see mentally into 2D. It's also the ability to look at a 2D drawing, that you did or someone else did, and see what is wrong with it -- if you have a good eye, the errors just jump out of the paper and then you fix them.

(2) is the ability to put down on paper what you see in (1). It is the ability to use pencil, pen, charcoal, or whatever, to physically construct an image.

In my experience, (2) is more amendable to study and practice and taking classes and so forth. There are a lot of tricks to various media that it helps to just have someone teach you i.e. "okay, here's how you paint hair with oil", etc. (1) tends more to be something that you either have or you don't -- although lots of people will disagree with me on this and start saying how you really can train your eye. For the record, I don't disagree but I still think it's pretty clear that (1) has a strong innate component in people who are really good artists.

Personally I've always had a better eye than hands. Probably because the course my life took never let me spend a lot of time making art as an adult. It's really something you have to do daily if you want to be good.

Well, it's a bit more complex than those two - have you ever met an autistic artist who can only draw from reality or memory and has great difficulty making up anything original? They might have great eyes and great hands but the visual imagination or design ability is lacking.

I'm terrible at people through lack of practice backed by lack of interest- character design was never really my thing. My favorite Star Wars character growing up was probably the Super Star Destroyer...

I also am not very good at perspective since I have a hard time dealing with the lack of perfection that often results. I used to be the same with lighting shading but have managed to practice enough do a reasonable job.

Here's my deviantart for reference: http://prinzeugn.deviantart.com/ Note the lack of organics and works heavy on perspective.

I suck at drawing hair and facial expressions. My devianart: http://msw.deviantart.com/

Color.

Black and white makes value correction so much easier. And I've been reliant on using lines (and more recently lineweights) to describe forms. The second I jump to color, I have issues with palette selection and loss of value range (the white-to-black scale). It's on my current "to study and practice" list.

Also it's not specific to a topic, but I have trouble finishing drawings and paintings. I leave a lot of sketches half-polished. The looseness of the sketch lets me see what I wanted in the image, while obscuring the elements that weren't clearly defined in my head, or that I didn't want to bother finding reference for. This can more easily be described as "laziness". :p