Referencing is extra important starting out. Don't feel bad if the better part of your works are study, but don't be afraid to draw what you want either.
Being able to draw from the heart takes volumes of experience. Start with tracing if you are particularly rickety at art, but don't give up and keep pushing your skills.
I started with outline, always using something else as reference. Some people focus on painting/coloring first though.
Something that I consider important in the process of drawing is to have a defined scope: draw only a head, or only a hand, or limit your drawing time to 1 hour.
Once I started getting more comfortable with drawing heads, I started drawing the torso, tits and so on. After being able to draw a full-body character, I'd focus on shading/texturing/fabric creasing since your characters need clothing.
Trying to complete a fully-colored full-body character plus a scenario will just kill your motivation when everything looks out of place.
EDIT: I found out that having a proper drawing surface is important when drawing on paper. You will most likely not look at the drawing surface at a 90 degrees angle, so check your picture's perspective frequently, or else they might look skewed.
There's a how_to tag on Danbooru but it's mostly in not English - still, look for something that starts large with general anatomy and then slowly work your way down to more specific regions.
