When I started drawing last year, I quickly learned that I'd need references no matter how good I got. When I'm bored or want to learn a technique, I try to do an art study and replicate something I like on my own without looking it up. 

I'm currently interested in working on my anatomy a bit more. I'm also trying to practice doing line art since I eventually want to move beyond sketching. 

First, I find an artwork I really like. I've been playing a lot of Girls' Frontline and there's a lot of units in the game that go under the radar. One of my new favorites is APCK9, I really like how she looks and her pose might seem simple at first but there's a decent line of action as you can see from the orange line I drew.

If we break down the pose a bit, we can see that there's a few thing the artist does to make it appealing despite just being a standing pose. 

For starters, ACPK9 does not look stiff. Her shoulders appear very relaxed and her body is open towards the viewer. Her upper body is also at an angle, while the legs are slightly bent. Her arms are interesting to look at too. The arm with the APC9 sub-machine gun in her hand is in front of her body while the free arm/hand is slightly behind her (ignore my note), emphasizing her torso just slightly. 

APCK9 is not exactly sticking out her chest, but she still looks very confident in this pose. You can quickly assume that she's a professional in her line of work. 

People typically recommend that you use boxes to break down a pose, but I ended up drawing the egg-shaped torso that I learned from studying a book called Morpho. I think I like it a little more because I can visualize the neck and some of the shoulder muscles a bit better. 

As for the line art practice, there's a certain style that I want to learn. I think this pen gets very close, but in the original art the lines are slightly textured, kind of like a pencil. 

I'm using Clip Studio Paint because I prefer all the tools that are included in the software. I also have Procreate on my iPad, but I'm not too crazy about it. One of the benefits of CSP is that I can pose 3D models and download a bunch of neat community assets. However, for most of these studies I try to keep it simple. Actually, the image of APCK9 that I loaded was in full color but I think CSP recently added an import feature that lets you extract the lines and turn the image monochrome. It's really useful for looking at stuff like shading, too.