IT'S ME. Mostly. I have a limited ability to visualize - I can only do it with concerted effort, can't sustain it for long, and it's disorienting and vaguely unsettling when I try! I realized at some point that it was something a majority of people did, and tried to train myself into it... but it has basically no relation to how I normally think of things. Even now I can only visualize things that are moving - static images are a no-go. I just tried to imagine a red square, and no dice.
I've also been trying to learn how to draw for the past [cough] years, and depending on which method one goes with, lack of visual imagination can be either a hindrance or a relative non-issue. Drawing from reference: cool! Sketching stuff out in an exploratory fashion: challenging but fine! The school of thought that says "you gotta plan every line before you lay it down": well, better pack up and go home. This might be why I have a hard time staying on-model when drawing people - I may have an intellectual idea of "they look kinda like this," but I don't actually know what they're gonna look like this time until I've already drawn it. A long-time favorite artist of mine once mentioned offhand that they don't visualize, and also have trouble making people look consistent... but they've got a kickass style and great technical chops, so clearly it's possible to get good regardless.
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Date: 2016-07-23 04:27 pm (UTC)I've also been trying to learn how to draw for the past [cough] years, and depending on which method one goes with, lack of visual imagination can be either a hindrance or a relative non-issue. Drawing from reference: cool! Sketching stuff out in an exploratory fashion: challenging but fine! The school of thought that says "you gotta plan every line before you lay it down": well, better pack up and go home. This might be why I have a hard time staying on-model when drawing people - I may have an intellectual idea of "they look kinda like this," but I don't actually know what they're gonna look like this time until I've already drawn it. A long-time favorite artist of mine once mentioned offhand that they don't visualize, and also have trouble making people look consistent... but they've got a kickass style and great technical chops, so clearly it's possible to get good regardless.