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Comment by declan_roberts | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me how someone with aphantasia can draw a picture at all? How can you draw a picture of a dog if you can't mentally picture what a dog looks like? Seems impossible.

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Maybe this is why I am terrible at drawing lol. If I try to draw a dog there is a good chance most people wont be able to tell it's a dog.

I can try to draw one because I know the characteristics of a dog and I can fulfill them as I am creating the shape on the paper. But I don't think I see it ahead of time.

It’s more of an artisan muscle memory thing. You can definitely tell sometimes, that someone has the right hand movements to sum up all the details that make a complete painting, but the overall composition is lacking in the coherence or planning or perspective. The result being something like medieval manuscript animals. There are still rules such as perspective lines and so on that can compensate. How can someone code without planning the architecture beforehand? Line by line, but spaghetti structure arises subtly. If you just start drawing, you have a sense of the next stroke, and next stroke. But yeah, drawing by markov process can lead to shoddiness without a clear guiding visualisation.

You still know the shape.

But the answer is definitely 'not very well'.

I’ve heard of artists with aphantasia, just maybe there are fewer as a percent than the general public.

I think that sculpting would be much better suited as the properties and relationships of an object hold true. When making a 2d drawing it's a projection which has very different relationships.

I can’t really. If I draw I need reference material.

I can make little play dough models though? I know the shapes I just can’t see them in my mind.

This is exactly why my drawings suck, lol. I know the basic shape of a dog but the details escape me.

Well that would certainly explain why I've always been absolutely terrible at drawing...

It's honestly more confusing to me that most people are bad at drawing but supposedly most people don't have aphantasia.

I have aphantasia and I can draw decent images.

When I put pencil down on paper, I start drawing and the lines tell me if it the physics or perspective make sense.. then I erase and retry if they don't. The more I practice the more I can anticipate which strokes will make sense.

It’s similar for me. It has to be a very iterative process where the image emerges rather than me having a solid idea in my head and bringing it to life.

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