this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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an famous artist I knew gave me some advice
just draw what your mind's eye sees. You can make it happen exactly as you see it in your mind if you focus on that mental image and stay true to putting it on the medium. If it doesn't happen at first, it just means you need to practice. It will happen if you stay true to yourself and what you see in your head.
This has real "draw the rest of the owl" vibes.
The "mind's eye" (if ygu've got such a thing) doesn't really work that way. You usually don't have a fully formed image in your mind.
Your brain will leave out stuff without noticing that something is missing. Also: you can't really get proper proportions from your "mind's eye". Also: what you're imagining usually also shifts a bunch.
IMO, much better advice from an art teacher who once told me that this is their response to when people say that they can't even draw a straight line: "Don't you have a ruler?"
Start with just drawing basic shapes. Then think about how you'd turn things you see in the world into those simple shapes. Practice doing just that. Spend a day just drawing curves the way your favorite artist does. Look at how they use color or texture in a drawing that you like.
Talent is simply an applied interest in something. Learning the how and why something works and then building the muscle memory to do it yourself.
And for one more trick that blew my mind when somebody first told me: a ruler works just as well on a tablet or screen as it does on a piece of paper.
Each person's mind's eye is different. Some people can keep a fully formed image in their mind for hours. Other for minutes and some people can't form an image at all.
People are weird and run the full gamut of abilities.
Yea, it does. It's wobbly but it's there.
interesting, I have aphantasia, and drawing/creating is how I can see things from my imagination.
Yup. I close my eyes and I see absolutely nothing.
To be honest, that might be the hardest thing to draw. Lemme take my pencil and magically make the paper disappear!
I can still draw, just not copy pasting from my mind
Did this work for you? I'm earning my living as an illustrator and designer and for me it's part of the process that what I envision and what ends up on the (digital) paper is never the same. And that is ok, sometimes I feel it was better "in my head" but almost always whatever ends up in reality takes over / erases what I thought I wanted to do. Which is ok as well.
I also think if you never drawn before you could for sure just draw stuff in your head but it might be a good idea to at some point (or even start with) doing classic "learn to draw stuff" like doing online or in person courses, copying others (DO NOT PUBLISH THESE ANYWHERE) etc, to learn about perspective, colour, anatomy etc. But then I've drawn since I was a child and have no idea what the best way to learn drawing would be (I'm also sure this is different for different people).
Do you feel comfortable sharing your work ? I love that there's illustrators on Lemmy. That's more or less what I do too, although lately I've been working on a 3D short film, so hardly any drawing work. Here is my artstation page https://www.artstation.com/hadrien_brissaud
it helped me a lot but it's not a perfect science
I can’t even make my handwriting look like it does in my head.
I dont have that my mind flickers, I did the apple test a lot with strangers and friends in college, results varied greatly, some ppl can hold a image, some ppl cant even make an image, in my case anything I visualize in purpose flickers, when I zone out its solid
Basically imagine an apple on a table, the apple falls off
what color wass the apple what did it do after it fell just ask for any sort of description
some ppl see nothing at all, like no visual
for some the apple doesnt hit the ground for some it doesnt bounce, for some it rolls, etc.
for some its red
for some its the concept and no color I dont get that one
I know this is word vomit felt I had to explain the apple thing, I saw it on reddit once and just started asking everyone for years because it was fun to heae the differences
That's the thing. I don't have a mind's eye.
you can't see images in your mind? oh my friend, I am so sorry 😞