An observation: You don’t have to have a pencil in your hand to improve your art. A lot of art involves your eyes and your mind. The more you observe, the more you learn.
To capture the personality of your subject, you need to see how it moves and how it relates to the world. You need to observe. Part of being an artist is noticing colors, shapes and how things change in different light. This is a photo of a Western Tanager outside my studio. I looked out my window and for three days they were flying all over, passing through on there way to somewhere else. One day I came home and my son said look. There on the window was a splat of red and yellow color. One of the birds had slammed its head into the window leaving a circle of feathers behind. My son ran outside and picked it up in a little box to keep it safe until it got it’s bearings back. It then flew up into a nearby tree to recover. One morning they were here and then they were gone, not a single flash of yellow and orange in the trees. The splat of feathers is gone from my window but the observation of the birds is tucked safely in my brain for future illustrations.