I started by drawing (er, attempting to draw) the character Max in from a manga I found in the Kindle Store. Then, after my mom found out my obsession with manga, she borrowed a few manga novels from the library (Rayearth 1 and 2, and one about a ten, maybe 11 year old vampire and her guardian). I really liked the pictures on the first few pages of the Rayearth books (the vampire one's art style was seriously hard to draw. T_T), so I drew them over and over again before I had the body shape and pose in my head, so I could draw it without the picture in front of me.
Finally, I started to draw by myself, without having a picture with me (unless I was drawing a canon character). But, all of my characters had the same pose and view, upper body with the arms behind the back. So, I tried to draw different poses… And all of them were horrible disproportionate. D:
Now (after, let's see, three years of practice?), I can draw very good people that are proportionate. :)
There's the life story of my art. XD
Read more: How did you begin to draw?