>>1612Copying other drawings isn't indicative of your ability to do a commission when someone tells you to draw a mouse riding a computer mouse with a dorito on his head. You would be fucked because there's nothing you can reference for that, so you'll have to rely almost entirely on your imagination for it.
I'd disagree with
>>1610 on the age thing a little bit. If you want to get serious about it, it doesn't matter when you have that epiphany, you can always git gud if you're ready to put a lot more effort into it than you've ever done before. But that's where the problem is. It actually takes much more effort and time than people realize, and most artists who manage to go through that are people who genuinely love doing art, not just someone who dreams of being a pro artist some day.
Freelancer is essentially someone who gets hired for projects or even a single drawing (more understood as a 'commission'). Freelancer doesn't work for any particular company. The downside of that is you'll have to constantly be on lookout for work. Most of freelance work comes to you, you don't necessarily have to go looking for it. The most common way to get work is to simply get your name known. Get a following in different websites, post your best art into galleries (ALL OF THEM), participate in the communities, make connections. Somehow someone will find you and want to commission something from you, or perhaps hire you for a short project. If you do a good job, your name will spread with the project, and the project group might also recommend you to others. It's a very different way to function than being hired in a studio.
As for what to work on, I'd start simple; practice drawing shapes like cubes, pyramids, rings, simple shapes. Draw a wireframe around your drawings so you can feel the form better. Just try to get a hang of drawing shapes. (2nd pic related, try practicing things similar to the top-most row)
You need to get hang of the basics before you can move onto something more complicated.
Especially humans.
Human body is a very complicated thing, and if you can't draw basic shapes yet, drawing people is going to give you a tough time.
I've heard
Fun With a Pencil by Andrew Loomis is a good book for beginners, although I haven't read it so I can't say much about it.
I know it might seem kinda boring, but you can apply it to your own drawings too. If you want to draw a dude with a red shirt and a yellow antigravity hair, think about the head as a sphere, and the hair as a cone. Neck is a cylinder, and the body is a combination of a bunch of spheres and cylinders and rectangles. Then try to draw them as those shapes, once it looks good, you can draw the details on top of it and erase the extra stuff.
There's a ton of things to learn, but you gotta start somewhere. Don't get discouraged if you feel like you do everything right but it still doesn't work out. It just takes a lot of experience to learn how to get it right.