If you were not always good at painting and drawing, what helped you develop those skills?  I know my sister was always much better than me at drawing.  I have never quite figured out how to get what is in my head onto the paper with the right proportions.  I can draw some really simple things, some flowers, trees, ect with fairly good proportions, but more detailed things just don't work out right and I've never been able to make much improvement there. 

Take heart: Nobody springs from the womb with DaVinci's fine motor skills.

That said, some people are just wired with an intuition that applies really well for translating three-dimensional visuals into two-dimensional visuals. I think I watched a documentary about artistic savants where they attached electrodes to the heads of non-savants and pulsed something into their brains after and before they drew the same thing. The drawings after the electro-shock treatment were strikingly better than the ones before.

But I'd prefer to just keep practicing, because, as I said, nobody starts out good at drawing. There was a television series I used to watch called The Imagination Station where a cartoonist taught viewers how to draw and I learned a lot from that...even though I didn't want to be a cartoonist, I did want photo-realistic DaVinci style drawings with perfect proportions and shading that makes it come alive, and everything that wasn't and isn't that is just proof of how innately awful I am at art!

Mostly, though, I draw because I feel like I need to. I think that can help a lot with practice, the feeling that the creative force is somehow bigger than yourself, so any effort to get it out there at all is worth the embarrassment at the quality. And, sometimes, I look at something that I drew, and it's no DaVinci but I just like it. And then I look at drawings that I did before, and I might like them and I might not, but I can compare and see where I'm getting technically better in general (although I might have produced something on a lazy day, where I just didn't have my head in the game. Generally, though, practice does make improvements.) And that's very encouraging.

I started drawing when I was little, like most kids, I guess. Naturally, much of what i was drawing was not proportionate.
As I got older, and focused more on drawing horses (my favorite animals), and the proportions got better with practice. 

I also traced pictures of horses that I found in books, and even magazines and comic books. The tracing actually helped me to get a better feel for drawing the parts of the horse at the size they were supposed to be.

I think that if you have a desire to draw, and you know what you want to draw pictures of; then just keep practicing, and things will get better.

Unfortunately not being good at drawing really took the joy out of it as a kid and I never really got it back. Some people have encouraged me to draw again with such enthusiasm they were practically telling me to do it.  Sometimes I really have the desire to draw and enjoy it, it's just that every time I have tried again I get bored in like 5 minutes and don't want to do it anymore as soon as I realize I don't like what I'm seeing on the paper.