A Curious Thing This Aphantasia

How do you make art if you can't see anything in your mind's eye?

Since I learned earlier this year, that I have aphantasia, I’ve become curious as to how my imagination works. In science, imagination is tied to visualizing in the mind’s eye, but I have never felt a lack of imagination. For me, something, maybe it’s a split second image, maybe it’s a feeling paired with a thought, but something pops in and provided access to memories, ideas, past learning and new ideas created from all that I learn and understand.

A recent study has begun to make me feel like my brain fires differently and doesn’t always make the connections between all those brain signals. This article has provided some clues.

OK, let’s step back for a moment. Aphantasia¹ is defined as being blind in the mind’s eye. Meaning, when you try to visualize anything, you don’t see it at all. You can take a test here to see where you fall on the spectrum.

I never spent much time thinking about how I make art, but I often felt like my way was “wrong” or at the very least different than many other artists. I remember taking a class on Urban Sketching and the teacher said that he just takes a mental image of a scene and then draws it. I was blown away by this. I am constantly looking back up at a scene to see what is there. Anything that moves is generally lost to me unless I capture it right away. I much prefer drawing from a photo than from real life. First because of things disappearing from a real life scene. Second, because I can’t keep an image box in the same place when I look at the world. So my drawings get very wonky.

A week or so ago, I saw a post on Instagram by Peter H. Reynolds of a Peace Dragon.

A Snippet of Peter’s Peace Dragon

He shared that the woman who began this project, Linda Garrison Ragsdale, had passed away. I had the fortune to hear her story at a literary breakfast.

I kept thinking that I needed to make my own peace dragon. A flash, a thought, and a reminder would come to me out of the blackness of my mind’s eye and I’d think yes, make a dragon. And then I would think, I don’t know how to draw a dragon.

Finally during my morning journaling, I made an attempt at drawing a dragon.

First attempt from my memories and blind mind’s eye.

I went in search of some reference images. I began by drawing what was in front of me.

The top two were copied from the reference drawings and the bottom one is a first attempt at making it my own.

I have found that by drawing the reference images as they look, I get a sense of proportions, shapes, and styles. It’s sort of like embedding code into my body.

I kept going:

A pig and a cow dragon?

I still had work to do, but, the bottom one came from an idea that popped into my head. What if you use the letters P and D to create the dragon? Interestingly, after I drew this, I watched one of Linda’s TED X videos and she talked about teaching kids to draw a dragon by using their letters as the various shapes.

I was beginning to like where it was going, but I needed a more dragon look.

Final sketch.

What you don’t see is all the erasing and redrawing I did to get here. But even as I was creating the dragon, the idea blossomed into a little image story.

I liked my little dragon so much that I decided to take it into Procreate and finish it there.²

The final piece in Procreate.

Even this wasn’t simple. Here’s a 30 second video of how the final came to be.

I love working in Procreate to finish projects because I have so much flexibility to make changes and try out a variety of options. For me, creating a piece is like putting a puzzle together without a reference image. You really don’t know what you will get until you get there.

I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this topic. How does your creativity work? Where are you on the Aphantasia to Hyperaphantasia scale? What would interest you to discuss on this topic in the future?

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. If you found it interesting, helpful or think it would be helpful for someone else, please share it.

I’m not sure what will come next, but I’d love for you to join me on this ride into creativity, curiosity and figuring things out as we go along.

1. If you are curious to learn more about Aphantasia, check out the Aphantasia Network Website.

2. You can see more of my art on my website.