Aside from suggesting that you practice with cheap kitchen knives(or perhaps a Mora, but I believe the bushcraft knives are sharpened differently than typical knives), I'm not sure there's much help people can offer.
I personally recommend finding the "sweet spot" where you use enough pressure to make sure the entire edge maintains contact with the stone, but not so much that you're bearing down on the stone. Sort of a "medium" touch to it. If you're not removing metal fast enough, your stone isn't coarse enough.
As for the tip issue, you need to follow the curve of the blade as others have said, but I believe this is better demonstrated with pictures. These pictures are with a mini-belt sander, but the idea is the same.
This position will leave the tip untouched and over time will mess up the curve of the blade. This is what I suspect you're doing.
This position will round or dull your tip.
This is the "correct" position and will sharpen your tip without rounding it off or altering the curve of the blade.
The idea is to keep whatever part of the edge that is touching the stone perpendicular with the direction you're sharpening.
Though I'm no master freehander, as my hands are shakier than a drug addict's. Still, I hope to get it down someday. At the very least, while my edges aren't pretty, they're still damn sharp:thumbup:.
