I wanted to write down some thoughts that I've sort of had floating around in my mind for a long time but never really gave the effort to form it into a coherent topic to think over.
How Do you "Write" a Painting?
Ever since I've started trying to seriously bring thoughts into reality; either through code, through visuals or through audio, I've seen one pattern emerge through them, and it is that for activities that cannot be described completely in terms of words such as any artistic medium such as drawing, music, 3D sculpting/animation/modelling or anything similar, it's really hard to get help that is "passive" or "quick" in nature. Most of the stuff that you do with art isn't something that can be perfectly described in terms of words. The process of creating artistic works, and how one thing fits into another is a pretty hard process to describe, especially if you haven't ever been familiarized with it before. For example, its a very difficult task to put a tune that is playing in your head onto a piece of paper, or tell why one drawing of a person looks good and the other looks bad. These are things that people unconsciously know, but will not be able to put into a coherent sentence because they simply do not have the language to do so. Even if you are able to make a perfect description of a painting (barring describing every single pixel or milimeter), for example, a person might come up with a completely different interpretation or mental image of it because of the limitations of the spoken word.
With recent advances in technology and AI, however, this process of learning art, the study of relationships between objects, and so on might have started to be finally broken down into its most elementary terms as a psychological process, or maybe the AI models are just replicating the statistical consensus of its training data and using its AI model algorithm/whatever to create new things. I can't say much since I really haven't looked into this topic. Who knows, the two statements I made might be referring to the same thing!
The Hurdles of learning Non-Verbal Skills
Learning skilled art requires a lot of active, visual or non-verbal communication to actually learn. I'm not saying that its impossible to do or there aren't online resources for it, but the actual issue lies with the lack of the "feedback-and-rectify" loop that you may take for granted in the case of, say, learning programming, which is the hardest to replace. You might even extend this to a lesser degree to other lines of skill such as electronics or anything that requires real world input, but for the sake of simplicity and our main topic i'll be talking about art here.
Unlike in programming, where you can basically type in any question on a search engine and then in 80% of the cases instantaneously receive a direct or indirect solution to your problem, and learn from it, you are pretty much on your own if you want to teach yourself artistic skills. You aren't very likely to find a guy, who is at least somewhat experienced, AND who is willing to sit down and look at all of your crappy drawings and music loops and tell you what's wrong. In the case of progamming, however, you can get by without actually talking to or taking advice from anyone, and you have the internet to thank for that.
I think this is why you might find a large number of programmers in the modern age who are completely self-taught, and that happens, at least for the newer generations, because of such a great system of "passive" feedback that's been created by the internet. In addition to that, because of the inherent nature of how programming works, figuring out and learning from your mistakes is a trivial task (provided that you're approaching stuff in the right way). Whereas with art, it might take months or even years to even realize you're doing something wrong, and then getting yourself stuck in a loop or a set of unconscious workarounds. That's not to say a similar thing might not happen with programming, but you get a far wider surface of exposure if you make even the smallest effort to try to look up some problems because of how well documented common mistakes and practices are on the internet, at least on the entry level.
Books Aren't Really Enough for Anything
At some point in any line of skill, including programming, you have to start talking to other people to actually get better. You can't ever know whether books and documentation contain the correct or enough information as your scope of the problem becomes narrower and more specialized, you don't have all the time in the world to track down the last single bit of information, and you don't have all the time in the world to learn, try and experiment, and you can't even be certain that your experimentation and effort will lead to some solution or success. So, to save your finite time, your finite capacity to put in effort and your finite sanity, you need to talk to other people. Fortunately you don't need to be an extremely social person or some person that tries to make conversation with everybody, especially in the internet age with chatrooms and forums.
I've personally been quite guilty of this. I've put off the prospect of joining a chat room or a community for some of the things I was trying to learn on for a long time, and after hitting roadblocks in certain places, my learning stagnated to a little bit more than twiddling my thumbs.
It's also important, I think, to not go the other way and let the chatroom/forum/whatever become another source of distraction for you, like Youtube or other forums might become when you try to look up tutorials, advice or guides. This is still a problem for me and I've been trying to rectify this. It's also important that you give back to the community by actively helping out other people like they did for you. As you do, you might get to know more people in the community, and eventually know them well enough to collaborate on something.
One last point of note: the internet is a bad place, and filled with people who are, to put it lightly, not well adjusted. Don't want to sound like a nanny, but it might be a good idea to just keep a comfortable distance from people and keep interactions smooth when possible until you get to know them well, otherwise you may just make enemies out of people who are unreasonable to begin with, and bad things may happen to you. Be safe.