When I learned woodworking and apprenticed with a furniture maker, I spent the first several months just being the "gopher". Eventually I'd pestered him enough to let me use the machines to actually do something, and he pointed to a pile of wood and told me to make him something. That's it, no instruction, no advice, just told me not to cut my fingers off 'cause he wasn't going to pay for it. I made a small box that a special woman somewhere still treasures. As my skills developed, the next test was to make a chair. I asked him how but he wouldn't tell me; he just crawled up into the rafters and came down with an old dust-covered shaker reproduction that he'd made and told me to replicate it. I measured and felt and pondered over every angle and inch of that chair, and made its twin--of course, it took me about 100 hours, which was not a cost-effective piece, but it was an intense self-education in applying everything I'd learned just by watching him. I could still make that first chair today without taking a single measurement, just from the muscle memory.
So my advice is to reverse-engineer one of your favorite pipes, heel to stem, and just try to replicate it. Sketch it, observe it, feel it, and faithfully execute it. Then repeat. The old masters of any artistic discipline had to first stand on the firmament of the basics before they could strike out and let their hearts guide their hands.
