@Lachie
Drawing in itself is never bad. I'm certainly no expert, but I'm someone who is perpetually stuck in thought, and this is a subject I've put some thought in to. Forgive what might turn out to be a massive vomiting of information (and mind that these are only my thoughts, so don't let me corrupt you with any mistakes I've made!)!
Drawing is a form of communication. This shouldn't be a hard concept to grasp; just as people speak or write or wave their arms frantically to convey some information or message, drawing is equally used to record and convey information that can be used at a later time. Often the message is less direct in intention than more formal methods of communication, but the beauty of art or drawing is that the message almost always has a certain ambiguity about it. The viewer of your message and information will almost always apply their own breadth of visual understandings to your message. While drawing has a lot in common with formal/literal communication, it
There are two aspects to any communication, your physical/mechanical ability to perform, and the mental message you wish to convey. In speaking or writing, your vocabulary is the primary physical restrictor on how accurately you can communicate your message. In drawing, your physical ability to produce the strokes/lines/marks you intend to is the primary restrictor on your ability to communicate your message. Someone could have a crystal-clear image of what they hoped to produce, but if they lack the mechanical ability to produce the lines or pick the colours or otherwise manipulate their tools, it is quite possible that they'll end up with a message that isn't quite what they intended. The beauty of art, again, is that this is totally okay. It isn't nearly as easy for the viewer to pick out where you've minorly mussed up your message, as there will typically be such a wealth of information that picking through it for the nitty gritty would be too imposing and uninteresting a task for the casual communicatee. But I digress! While I'd hope this is at least thought-provoking, it isn't necessarily useful or relevant information, so let's carry on!
Where this starts to take relevance to your practice is in the considerations of what you hope to communicate, and what aspect of your communication you hope to improve. A point I skipped over earlier is that from what I understand, people will understand visual information as symbols, and that if your symbols aren't true or understandable your message will start to fall apart. What I mean by this is simple; if you're drawing a leg that doesn't look like a leg and doesn't show an understanding of the leg people will automatically and instinctively "feel" that it is wrong. Any non-artist won't likely be able to point to a specific error, but an observant artist or critic would be able to point to the specific element or elements that make it inconsistent with the symbol of "leg". As with any message, context becomes important, but at the risk of bursting forth on yet another tangent, I'll try bring this back to what it means to anyone practicing drawing:
Learn to draw TRUTH, then deviate from that. Anime is a perfect example of an art-form that heavily relies on symbols to communicate its message. Could any physical person actually look like an anime character? Barring certain case instances, I'd venture to say no... but it still doesn't look wrong, right? A temptation of starting artists is to draw superheroes/anime characters or other already bastardized instances of truth... and while I would definitely and obviously say that that isn't unforgivably bad (We ALL started that way, didn't we?), it certainly isn't something conducive to efficient learning. What you're doing by learning from cartoons is learning someone else's set of symbols that they created from their own understanding and deviation from reality. It will teach you things that the original artist would have recognized as conscious untruths with intent (Compare: Exaggerated important facial features for purpose of impactful expression OR Exaggerated important facial features because anime.)... and won't tell you that they're conscious untruths, nor their intent. Sure, you can puzzle out the purpose of these deviations and still learn without permanently damaging yourself, but by doing so you'd be adding a layer of complexity to your learning AND still not endeavoring to learn truth, but rather someone else's deviation from it. So draw from life, draw from reality, learn from what IS so you can make up what COULD BE.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU SPECIFICALLY MR LACHIE DAZDARIAN is that my only concerns for you drawing the human form on a tablet in pixel art is that it's convoluted practice. It's somewhat comparable to learning to play the piano while learning to ride a unicycle, but less obviously and pointlessly difficult. If you want to learn about the human form, isolate that as the purpose of your practice, and make EVERYTHING ELSE AS EASY AS POSSIBLE. Trying to exercise your mechanical ability to communicate while refining the message you'd hope to communicate WHILE restricting yourself to pixel art is a lot and diminishes your ability to actually absorb the lessons you could be learning. You'll learn stuff about all three, yes, but I'm inclined to believe that you'd learn them slower than if you'd spent time focusing specifically on specific aspects.
But as I said, drawing in itself is never bad. You'll always be improving something, and if you're careful about considering whether or not what you're learning is TRUTH, then you should be a-shootin' for the stars.
That was a lot of words. I like taking time to figure out what the heck I think about things. GOGO OFF TOPIC THREAD.