Comment above is spot on.
I blame the romantic view of the spontaneous talented genius artist that scribbles masterpieces in 20 seconds. Stuff like speed-paintings and 'tutorials' on YT have enforced this recently, and the internet in general warped people's perception of the craft (take a 4 meter x 4 meter picture of an apple traced over canvas with a projector, shrink it to 300x300 pixels on a screen and it'll look pretty damn photorealistic). You can edit a 4 hour painting so that it looks like an effortless 1 hour painting and then speed it up 4x with all the thinking and editing cut out to make it look even more effortless.
That makes the not wanting to suck part of starting to draw so much worse because of unrealistic expectations and a warped perception of the results you're going to achieve.
In any case drawing stick figures for gestures because Glen Keane did it in a few videos isn't going anywhere. There needs to be meat on them bones.
Sorry, I know this is kind of a dead thread. But I feel like I can help. I'm a long-time artist, both of imaginative and life drawing, as well as a life drawing model of twelve years, so I have a lot of experience around people doing life drawing and the discourses in different sessions and classes.
Your biggest problem is one that plagues a lot of new artists. You're afraid to suck. You have these ideas that are very close to your heart, that mean a lot to you, and you want to draw them, but you know with the skill you have now they'll look terrible, and the thought of that discourages and embarrasses you. You want to climb a mountain, train to become highly skilled at art, and then climb back down and wow people with your amazing, hard-won skills. You're willing to toil and work really hard on that mountain, but you don't want to be seen simply being a crappy artist aside from that mountain-based toil.
I think you will understand art better if you understand its true nature: that it is a language. I don't say this to be flowery. It is literally a way of communicating, from one person to another. Art communicates something, or it is not art. Learning to draw is about as hard as learning a foreign language. And people run into the same "mountain" mindset there. Say I'm going to study Swedish. I'm terrified of talking to Swedish people knowing only a handful of words and terrible grammar, pouring my heart out in broken Swedish, and looking like an idiot. I'd rather go onto a mountain, and study Swedish intensively for six months, then stroll down from the mountain completely and perfectly fluent, wowing Swedes with my witticisms and my subtle mastery of their language, which I seem to have picked up in the blink of an eye.
That's the fantasy. It never works like that, though.
To learn a language, you have to try to talk to someone. It has to matter to you that you can communicate with them. You can go to classes on Swedish and it probably won't hurt you any, but at some point, you should have the burning need to understand and be understood in Swedish, or you won't really learn it. It's the same with art. Art is learned when you try to use it to talk to someone. When you try to communicate your ideas, however poorly. You're waiting to have enough skill to have permission to draw the things that matter to you. I'm telling you if you don't start drawing the things that matter to you, you will never get there.
I've done gestures. They're all right! They're a nice warm-up. It's a little exercise in seeing the whole form rather than the parts. They're not a necessary boot camp to learn, just something you should do if you enjoy it. But, as someone experienced in life drawing, let me give you a few more tips there. One, thirty seconds is too short. As a model, I've had inexperienced artists ask for gestures that short, and they were universally frustrating. The shortest gesture anyone actually got anything out of was one minute. Usually I do gesture poses of one minute and then some of two minutes, before moving into five, ten, fifteen, and twenty-five. Also, if you're working from photos, you're not doing the same thing. Literally. What makes drawing from life so unique is that, assuming you have two eyes, you see the model as a 3D image. It's actually vastly harder than you'd think to transfer a 3D object into a 2D drawing. When you look at a photo, it's already a 2D image. Now you're just copying something that's already static. Moreover, as a model, I can say that modeling is in itself a performance art. It's a lot more engaging to have a real person performing for you right now. They won't be there five hours from now or tomorrow! It's the difference between a concert and canned music. So if you want to study the form, there is no replacement for a real model.
But even more unpopular opinion—you don't have to study the form if you don't really want to. Everyone treats life drawing class as the mountain you go to train on, but it should never be that. You get good at what you do a lot of, nothing else, no replacements. If you want to draw manga, ignore the people who say you have to master realism first, they are factually wrong. People who learn only realism struggle with learning stylization and simplification. If you want to draw manga style, you should be drawing manga style now and that is what you will get good at. If you want to draw comics about your OCs, start drawing them even though it'll suck. You'll want to do your best on something you care about in a way you never will for some random naked photo you're copying. You'll push yourself. That's where growth happens, not level-grinding like a video game.
What a lot of new artists say when they look for improvement exercises like this is, "I want to grind on things I don't really care about so that I can get high-level artistic skill without ever embarrassing myself, ever looking like a fool, or ever pouring my heart into something I love that sucks and makes me look bad." But every artist can tell you, that humiliation conga line is the price we all paid. We all drew the furries, the sad one-eyed girls on Deviantart, the OC who's Sasuke's girlfriend, the OC who has the coolest weapons and beat up all the bad guys. They looked like crap and people laughed at us. And we had to be willing to go through that, communicating what we really wanted to say as best as we could, until we gained fluency and people weren't laughing anymore. There is no amount of secret vigorous hard work that saves developing artists that humiliation and lets them emerge onto the scene fully-formed and ready to be worshiped. You just have to suck for a while.