Blind Daydreams
I often have a lot of trouble picturing things in my mind. Maybe I have some level of aphantasia or something, I'm not sure, but it can make it difficult for me to bring ideas out of my head and into reality since I don’t actually know what they look like in any kind of detail. As an artist this can mess with my head. Sometimes it makes me feel like I have no imagination, even though I have plenty of evidence to prove otherwise. Other times it makes me feel like a bad artist, like this is something I should be able to do easily and I wonder how it is for other artists. Are they able to see the thing they want to create clearly in their mind and use that as a reference, or do they also constantly get stuck tryin to work out how things connect and having to trawl through not-quite-right reference pictures?
I remember being a kid in primary school and this guy coming and doing a visualisation with us. He told us to close our eyes and imagine ourselves on a beach. I closed my eyes and tried to picture a beach, the image mostly a blur of yellow, red, and white light, with the occasional image of a beach flickering in every now and then like a subliminal message. He started going into all this detail of what he wanted us to see. An umbrella with blue and white stripes, our footprints in the sand, and I remember stressing out because he was moving too quickly and I hadn't even gotten the damn shoreline to show up properly yet.
I snuck a peek around the room to see if any of the other kids looked like they were concentrating as hard as I was to get this to work. They all looked relaxed. Obviously I couldn't see into their heads, so I don't know what they were actually seeing, but at the time it felt like I was the only one having trouble with the exercise and it made me feel like an idiot. Dreading the next task of 'okay, now draw the image you saw so we can compare how differently everyone saw it.' Uh... Okay I guess I'll just make it up on the paper then. I'm sure this would have been about here, and the footsteps were probably going off along here...
As I got older I kind of forgot about all that and just started to assume that nobody really saw actual clear pictures in their head when they closed their eyes unless they were dreaming and it was more of a metaphor. I use to day dream a lot, I still do, but it wasn't like real dreams. For me, when I zone out like that my focus softens and visual stuff kind of just fades away as I get lost in my thoughts. When I have an idea for something I want to make, often I just have a feeling and some idea of what kind of look I want it to have using pre-existing things as reference points I can try to grasp onto. When I see these other artists creating crazy awesome imagery straight out of their heads in perfect detail, it blows my mind.
I always hear people complaining about their skill sets not matching to be able to create what they see in their head, and I guess I always assumed that was the issue I had, but I'm pretty good at drawing from a reference, so maybe that's not really my problem. Maybe my problem is that I can't create the reference to start with. Apparently aphantasia is a thing and people actually do see real images in their heads in some form or another, so that's kind of annoying for me. (Also annoying that the stuff I can picture the easiest is stuff I don’t want to, thanks intrusive thoughts).
I can't help but wonder how much of an effect this has on my art, maybe I would be making super awesome and amazing stuff if I had the ability to conjure up clear images to work off. But I guess the stuff I make now is still pretty cool, even if it is mostly being made up as it crosses over from my brain to reality where I can see it in front of me.
I'm curious how good other people's mental imagery is. I have no problems when I'm asleep, stuff gets super vivid and real when I'm in the dream realm, but when I'm awake it seems to be a whole lot of dark sludge, shifting silhouettes, and flickering glimpses, like I've got my radio tuned smack in the middle of 3 different stations and they're all cutting eachother off and trying to break through the overwhelming sound of static.
If you feel like it, comment and let me know if you struggle with this also, or if you have good mental visualisation, and if you do, WHAT IS IT LIKE? What do you actually see?