I keep coming back to the same advice I was given the first time I picked up a real pencil: draw from life. Not from a photo, not from memory — from the thing itself, sitting somewhere in front of you, refusing to hold still.
There's a kind of attention you can only borrow when something is in the room with you. Photos flatten everything. They settle the light. They throw away the small movements — the way a leaf shifts when the heater turns on, the way a hand betrays its weight even when the model is trying to stay perfectly still.
Drawing from life is partly an act of patience and partly an act of trust. You trust that what you're seeing now will be enough, even though it's already changing. You stop trying to capture and you start trying to listen.
I'm not very good at it yet. But I think that's the point.