Almost purely natural.
You need to be blessed with very good motor skills and you also need to have the capacity for understanding how things place out on the paper when drawing something.
LostProphetFLCL
Now, motor skills are absolutely a natural limitation for some people, but I find it highly unlikely that most people lack the motor skills necessary to draw. Even then, there's certainly potential to increase one's motor skills through repetition, though that might not produce such immediate or drastic results as learning about the more academic aspects of drawing. I'll give you that...lack of motor skills can be a big obstacle to someone drawing, though I don't think that most people have that problem. Most people have average motor skills, which I suspect are enough to be able to draw. Then their motor skills can improve a little bit through practice.
As far as understanding how "things place out on the page", that's pretty much largely academic. Granted, a creative and personal touch is going to be a requirement if you want to be an "artist" instead of just a "craftsman", and creativity is probably even harder to learn. But if you study what looks good and what doesn, and why, then it is entirely possible to draw some very pretty "happy trees" even if you don't have a single creative bone in your body. Learn what works, and do what works. That's pretty much purely academic, and I highly suspect that most people have the capacity to learn that, just like they have the capacity to learn the alphabet and their multiplication tables.
Edit: also, I think that there's largely this kind of myth that artistic creativity is somehow separate from traditional academics. Maybe to a small extent, but I don't really buy into that idea very strongly. I think that too many people have this idea in their heads that an "artists" should be able to just create art, and then ignore what role thinking about art plays into how good that art becomes.
Take Ansel Adams. AMAZING photographer, but he wasn't just good at it. He put a LOT of thought into what he was doing, in order to get it to look better. He learned about chemistry and optics in order to get a larger idea of what tools and processes he could use in order to make his work better. That's academic. Then, when he went out to shoot, he THOUGHT about what he was doing, PLANNED through his entire workflow in order to maximize what he could get out of the pictures. He didn't just blindly shoot, people who can draw don't just blindly draw, and people who can paint don't just blindly slap paint onto a canvas. People think about what they are doing, and that really helps a LOT in any field of study, be it art, biology, literature, or mathematics.
As far as drawing goes, one should be able to think ahead and visualize what the drawing looks like. They should then plan out how they work on the drawing in order to get to that final point. If the actual drawing does not match with what you had in mind, then it is very unlikely that you "just can't draw". More likely, you screwed up somewhere during the process of taking the image in your mind and then translating it onto a page. Find out WHERE you screwed up, and then make a better effort to not screw that same thing up again.
Do not just say "I can't draw". Be aware of your weaknesses. If you draw something and it sucks, identify specific things which are causing that drawing to suck. Then work on those things. But art is not exempt from standard problem-solving. And when it comes to that, saying "this just plain sucks" really isn't an answer. A mechanic wouldn't look at a car, say "this car just sucks", and then give up. The mechanic would try to isolate specific problems, and work on those. Same thing applies to drawing, painting, photography, and getting a first time managerial job at a chain restaurant. If you take a job and you suck at it, how long does it take you to give up? The best thing to do is to first identify what you're doing wrong, then fix it. But you can't fix bad ANYTHING (drawing/photography/automotive skills/whatever) without first thinking logically about what you're doing wrong and what you need to work at. It's pretty damn hard to solve any problem without first diagnosing it, and saying "I just plain suck at this" usually isn't an excuse for why you're not getting better at it. Saying "I just plain suck" really usually doesn't EVER say ANYTHING about identifying someone's failings, in any particular area. The question isn't whether or not you suck at drawing, the question is WHY you suck at drawing. Identify that, then work on that. Draw smarter, not just harder.
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