When drawing, if I only use the mental imagery then I tend to draw blobs of value and symbolic shapes without respecting the true proportions of the object. What I fill in the details with instead are learned contours: motion patterns are easy to train with repetition, and when they are combined with an arrangement of primitive forms, more complex stuff can be described without visualizing it completely at any step.

If you do some contour drawing exercises, you'll notice right away how much you can fill in just by getting a decent silhouette: a lot of systems of figure drawing simply go into more detail with that and aim to codify rules for what lines are necessary.

do you mean flat shapes? do you have any recommendation for learning resources using this method of contour drawing?

I wasted years trying constructional drawing (3d boxes etc) without results.

Similar here. It's like I suddenly have access to an instant MidJourney that I can prompt with any suggestion. Sometimes a late night whisky before bed seems to help the process. Find myself wondering "is this what visually creative people get to do all the time?".

Amateur artist here. I rely on imagining images with lots of detail. Then drawing/painting it out is almost a matter of tracing the mental projection onto the canvas. Often the image in my mind is more clear to me than whatever is physically in front of me. It is a lot like intentional dreaming.

In such cases it's useful to occasionally direct all your imagination to the highest ideal known to you, better if it's abstract. This can be compared with trying to hear the finest sound in your surroundings, and making it crystal clear to you.

Reminds me of the anecdote about Dali staying awake in a chair with a spoon in his hand, then trying to sketch the hypnagogic imagery that came to him in the brief moment between when he fell asleep and when the spoon hit the floor and woke him up.

https://www.livescience.com/little-known-sleep-stage-may-be-...

Sounds like hypnogogic hallucinations and/or the hypnogogic stare. Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali (an)used this state for creativity supposedly.

Visualization is a skill that can be trained. Close your eyes for a few minutes a day and visualize and mentally "reward" yourself during the brief glimpses when the visualization is hyperreal. Eventually you can tap into it easier. It's very close imo to lucid dreaming. An easy way to help kickstart it is move around in 3D space in the imagining. Sometimes interesting stuff happens like if you are visualizing a fireplace you will suddenly feel a bunch of heat as though a fire were in front of you.

Do artists really visualize the whole thing? To me it seems more like a feedback loop, you start with a rough visualization, you draw something and that drawing feedback into the visualization process and then you draw more details and so on. Also it seems that in this process you can focus on visualizing different parts of the whole thing to get clarity about the details for specific parts.

In musical terms this is called audiation - the ability to imagine sound. From my experience, this can be acquired indirectly over time through regular vocal and musical practice (e.g., singing in a local choir or practicing an instrument). You can write music with or without it, or using both: sometimes you have a specific sound in your head that you want to materialize, other times you're experimenting with your instrument and discovering new sounds that you could not have imagined.

I don't know how much of this applies to visual artists, but there's probably some overlap there.

> the ability to imagine sound

This is a real, normal thing?? I can hear snippets of music, usually orchestral or opera, as vividly as if they were actually playing, but all I'm listening to is the white noise of a fan, and I'm just remembering them from before. When I was young, it was often a radio announcer because we listened to the radio in the car a lot. I always thought this was very bizarre and was not supposed to happen to normal people.

I have no issue imagining sounds, with any detail I want. It’s images that are hard (but then more abstract things like graphs are easy).

Do you actually hear the music in the fan noise or do you hear/imagine it in your mind? The first one is to consider carefully as it happens on LSD and in psychosis - maybe also strong synaesthesia or HPPD - , the second one is normal.

Sounds like audial daydreaming, where white noise would be perfect for triggering almost any memory of music depending on the fluctuations of frequencies. Staring at the static on an old TV does the same thing visually if you look at it and relax your focus.

There is a technique of drawing where it's more like a printer. You progress down line by line only drawing what is needed in that row. when you get to the bottom your done.

This style of drawing doesn't have that feedback loop of looking at what you already have on the paper. Everything is planned in advance and you can't go back to change stuff.

I'd read that Tesla designed in his mind's eye, the A/C electric motor which was thought to be impossible by others. Here's an article I found in a search[0].

Whenever I try, I only get the blobs and don't have great control of even the blobs: barely recognizable if at all. I have on rare occasion have moments of lucid dreaming where it starts as a regular vivid dream, but then I realize that I may be dreaming and have some control of myself or the scene. I could will myself to fly around, but not very high off the ground. Maybe the realism of the vision was forcing an unconscious (even within a dream?) safety measure.

[0] https://mindtasting.medium.com/the-mind-of-nikola-tesla-4305...

I'm the opposite, in my mind it's almost like a CAD program mixed with Photoshop and I have complete control over building and visualizing anything. I can imagine building a lego set piece by piece and how each component looks, feels, slots together with others, etc. I can rotate it all around and imagine sides that aren't visible. I can change the colors and the textures and imagine any kind of lighting. As a kid I would just imagine playing with toys I saw on TV.

I visualize the whole process quickly but forget that it needs to happen in real time. I often underestimate how long things will take because of that, I have to be mindful to properly consider how long it takes to eg, turn the screws, collect the materials, set the glue etc.

Can you visualize a blackboard and perform calculations ‘by hand’?

I read somewhere some very proficient abacists are able to just picture the instrument in their heads and then proceed to do impressive mental arithmetic by just operating the imagined abacus.

In that case you should be able to imagine a 5x5 grid with letters and then clearly see the words along the diagonals?

Don’t forget this can be trained as well. Mental imagery can become a lot sharper if you want it to be.

I think mental imagery is always sharp, it’s just your perception and/or your memory of it that sucks. Perhaps a bit like dreams.

I’m somewhat of a lucid dreamer and those are incredibly realistic, way, way beyond what I can conjure up consciously. It opened me up to the idea that your mind might be capable of more than you have conscious control over and the role memory plays in this.

This is exactly me, and I've never heard anyone else describe it before.

I usually take post-lunch naps frequently and between falling sleep and been awake my mind achieves a state of brute-forced creativity and thinking. Dunno how to call it.