And now that I think about it, trying to do this on a regular basis sounds like a pretty good way to boost one’s ability to hold a whole drawing in one’s head and “trace” it onto the paper, rather than doing a rough. I would not be surprised if this ability started as a game he played with himself when he was sitting in the back of his least favorite high school classes, doodling away.

(I am an artist; I can’t do this particular trick but I have definitely had moments when I was totally into a drawing and it felt like I was tracing it onto the paper from my mental image of it, with the hand of a dead artist I’d been studying guiding mine. I was also pretty high at the time; there’s some strains of weed that artists favor because it can give us a boost to this sort of ability.)