When it comes to drawing from imagination, how thoroughly visualized

>>2386987
Think of a story you want to tell about yourself, the world, whatever. Draw a picture that convays that though visual narrative.

I want cover art from my book Name of the wind, it's about a musician boy learning sympathy magic at a university. So I'll draw a picture of him traveling there, lute on his back, wind through his hair, the university in the distance, convay an idea of how this world looks, and feels.

>>2387039
The Name of the Wind is shit.

>>2387054
Ha you can't even give a reason why.

You're pathedic

>>2386987
thumbnails, there's no magic

>>2387539

>there's no magic

Nobody asked "the secret to drawing from imagination", it was just a thread on how people approach it. It's not like there's a universal approach.

I start by drawing simple lines, then go from there. I draw what I see.

>>2386987
>When it comes to drawing from imagination, how thoroughly visualized is your stuff before you start?

Depends. A sketch will usually start with a vague idea, and I'll let the drawing that appears dictate how it should continue. The end result doesn't match some crisp mental image before I started, as there's often only a haze at best.

Sometimes a sketch might start with a plain, simple form, then I flesh it out into something as I go.

An illustration by comparison will involve a ton of planning. First figuring out what you want to show and how you want to show it. This leads to thumbnails, exploratory sketches, references and studies if needed, then commencing the final painting. In that situation, I might have a fairly close idea of what I want the final to look like (maybe 80% accurate) before I actually start the final painting, but that's usually only after a ton of planning went into it. Even then, insignificant parts of the painting will be figured out later.

In my experience, what you might think is a super crisp mental image before you start is actually vague as fuck. Similar to how you think you can imagine a tiger or an elephant perfectly, but when it comes time to draw it you don't actually know what anything looks like. On the other hand, if you've been drawing nothing but tigers for years, you could probably imagine and rotate a 3D mental model of a tiger with great accuracy.