How important is visualization when it comes to painting and

>>3031637
What she meant was that it's impressive you don't fall into symbol drawing and actually look at the thing you're drawing. Alternatively, visualization is just memory.

>>3031637
>people are actually supposed to compose images when they close their eyes

desu this just sounds like idiosyncratic mumbo jumbo specific to this teacher

you don't need to literally close your eyes to visualise something with your imagination, I usually just look at the empty paper/screen while I visualise

>>3031637
Oh man I have the same problem... I didn't know there was a name for it. No wonder I have trouble with memory drawing too. Fuck. I thought that was how everybody functioned.

During those exercises I just stare at one spot on something so that the shape of the object gets sort of burned into my eyes, as well as taking mental notes to remember things about placement, form, negative space, anything I can hold on to that will help me piece it together and draw it without looking. Then when i look at my paper i have a negative (from the staring at one spot) to help me see, if only for a second while im sketching in the general form, what the fuck the thing actually looked like.

Oh, sometimes muscle memory can help too. If you look at the object and put your hand out as if you're tracing it, then go over it over and over while you're looking at it before you draw, that might do something for you.

I think you should say fuck this shit and find ways for you to keep improving as an artist. You might not be able to visualize, which does suck, but you can get to a point where you can draw from imagination by doodling about until you find something cool. Then from there it's just like a puzzle, taking a silhouette or sketch and making it into a sweet painting by figuring out the form, perspective, and lighting on your own plus after that point you've got whatever references you might need for any detail you can't vizualize.

Most important thing is that you are creative and study a lot, draw every day.

Good luck to you, friend.

>>3031649
>I usually just look at the empty paper/screen while I visualise
Different anon but when i try that i just see the empty paper/screen in front of me
am i fucked?

>>3031658
Eh I guess I didn't fully read the OP I actually didn't know there are people with this kind of impairment.

Good news is that you (I assume) can still work just fine using reference and that's a perfectly valid way to make art and thanks to google etc it's easier than ever to find references for anything you can think of

>>3031637
>aphantasia
That's a thing? Is that why I can't draw any person including myself from memory?

>>3031664
Aphantasia is the inability of visualizing. Basically when you close your eyes, you see blackness and that's it. If you scratch your eyes you'll see some incomprehensible color/light, and before going to sleep you may be able to hallucinate a bit, but you'll have no control over what you're seeing (which can be somewhat scary).
That anon can't draw anything specific from memory, for he can't visualize anything in the first place. You may just have a shotty, inefficient imaginations (which is still better than nothing).

>>3031637
At least you're not a sculptor, in that case you would have been 100% fucked. I don't know about drawing, but it will certainly affect your usage of colors. You probably can still get pretty good at drawing realistic subjects

>>3031662
Can you describe what its like to visualize something? Do you see the whole finished picture before you even start painting it?

>>3031684
You immediatly see an approximation of it, then you tinker with it until it sayisfies you. In the process you memorize it to a good extent, but everytime you'll reimagine it something will be missing. The degree of control over imagination varies vastly. Some of my students see nothing, others can barely organize shapes, other ones can immediatly create visuals as realistic as real life, one student in particular told me that the textures he imagined felt a bit more real than real life, which creeped me out. I'd say that greaT visualizations and photographic memory is the best prize you can win at the genetic lottery, if you're a visual artist.

What I garner is that without visualization, the picture you end up drawing is totally up for grabs. It may be good, it may be bad, but it sure as hell will be more impersonal, and youll probably have no way of judging it.

>>3031687
Woah! That must be so cool. Thank you for answering me! Textures guy sounds a little weird.

So it sounds like what concept artists do, going through tons of silhouettes, pick one and then go through color tests, different shapes in the design, etc. until you get to something you like. Except it takes no time to draw and you can basically change things at an instant?

Though that's actually not a bad idea, if I just work like a concept artist to make up for this then it might be ok.

>>3031681
>and before going to sleep you may be able to hallucinate a bit, but you'll have no control over what you're seeing (which can be somewhat scary).

This is called hypnagogia and it's a really cool thing. Surrealists like Salvador Dali actually used it to come up with ideas for their paintings. I sometimes get visions this way that make me think wow I totally should draw that but I'm usually too tired to get up and sketch it down and I forget everything in the morning

>>3031684
It's very different from literally seeing something, it's more like a "shadow" of an image than a true image, and you don't actually see it the way you would see something with your eyes. You can still recall a lot of detail in it but that entirely depends on how intimately familiar you are with the subject. Study a thing a lot, and you'll be able to imagine it better, basically.

I do think it's related to dreaming, though, and there's a sort sliding scale from conscious imagining, through hypnagogia before sleep, into full-blown dreaming where you fully experience things and scenes in your subconscious mind like you were actually there.

If you try to remain conscious while falling to sleep when you go to bed, you may be able to experience this full scale, in a gradual succession, from full consciousness to full sleep. It's one way to reach a lucid dreaming state.

>>3031637
I'm always curious how people "see" their work before they start drawing/painting. Personally, I don't see anything, just know what it -should- look like. Push and pull until it's right. Assume it's part of the executive function disorder; working memory is shot. Still unsure if this sort of thing will change with years of practice, whether the ability to see things in your head correctly can be developed with drawing mileage. Currently the research points to no.

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>one student in particular told me that the textures he imagined felt a bit more real than real life, which creeped me out
visuals on certain subtances or deep dream states seem way more real than reality. I guess psychedelics is one path to improve visualization, but it's very dangerous, destabilizing path, and usually leads to psychosis. you might end up not caring about art at all anymore

>>3031703
>It's very different from literally seeing something, it's more like a "shadow" of an image than a true image, and you don't actually see it the way you would see something with your eyes.
You may have aphantasia or a weak imagination. Most people can imagine pictures and see them as if they were being captured by rheir real eyes. The visual aspect of visualization is very concrete.

>>3031718
>You may have aphantasia or a weak imagination

If that's true then it's absolutely not a barrier to drawing from imagination, because I believe I'm pretty good at that even if I say so myself. Though I suspect you just misinterpreted what I said

>>3031637

>aphantasia

Oh here we go again...

It's the same meme like ligameme and the spark. Unless you are actually brain retarded and by brain retarded I mean that you had some sort of accident with blood spilling on your gray matter, severe inborn genetic malfunctions like having one more or less chromosome or a water instead of brain tissue, you are fine.

You don't compose image in front of your eyes, biology doesn't work like that, most of what you can experience is a brief afterimage if you look at some colors or illusions hard enough, but these are specific effects that are meant to fuck with you.

This artist, although young and quite shitty, has a good idea, read this article:

https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/why-is-it-so-hard-to-draw-from-imagination-heres-how-to-do-it--cms-22967

In drawing or painting normally you don't rely on the vague shit your memory brings unless it is directed.

What you should get from the exercise your teacher showed you is what she didn't tell you - that when you are looking at the object for 2 minutes you should non stop ASK QUESTIONS to yourself about the object. Analyze it. How glass reflects, what happens to highlights when I move my head a bit left or right, from where light source comes, where and how are shadows forming, what is the structure of the glass, how can it be constructed, what makes it feel 3D, what is important to capture the look etc.

And then when you draw you should repeat those questions to yourself. Teach yourself a proper approach, a workflow, being analytic, setting boundaries to your work, directing your focus, breaking things down.

>>3031736

Instead of just looking, you should have taken your sketchbook/notebook/a piece of paper and list in points:

1. Deepest shadows form in X and Y
2. Highlights concentrate on the bumps at the surface around a thumb from the middle of it, they wrap glass container around
3. Glass has roughly trapezoid cross-section with a half-circle used to make sides curved a bit.
4. Reflectivity is achieved by...

etc.

You visualize when you ask proper questions. Learn to ask questions to yourself to direct your focus and understand the nature of things and shapes. Nobody cares if you have one eye opened or close when you do that or if you have to scratch your ballsack during the process.

>>3031637
Is it a bad sign if I can't even draw my spouse's face from memory? I see this faggot's face almost every day for 5 years and still can't visualize it.

>>3031664
No, it's because you haven't internalized those concepts.

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Read this post OP.

>>3026641

>>3031736
>when you are looking at the object for 2 minutes you should non stop ASK QUESTIONS to yourself about the object. Analyze it. How glass reflects, what happens to highlights when I move my head a bit left or right, from where light source comes, where and how are shadows forming, what is the structure of the glass, how can it be constructed, what makes it feel 3D, what is important to capture the look etc.
>And then when you draw you should repeat those questions to yourself. Teach yourself a proper approach, a workflow, being analytic, setting boundaries to your work, directing your focus, breaking things down.
That's some awesome advice actually

>>3031874
>>3031736
Yeah. Asking question is the most important.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160818162322/http://www.winwenger.com/archives/part24.htm

>>3031637
>>3031736
I agree with you senpai. People who say they see shit on the paper and trace it are full of shit. Every 1 can visualize some thing. You just need to figure out how to coax it out on paper.

For example I start with a solid single tone silhouette and do some construction to figure things and if necessary look at some refs of similar stuff to get it looking right. It is more like picking shapes out of clouds and refining that image with the skills and techniques you can find in resources from the sticky.

>>3031637

That's not true, I can see mental images in my head without closing my eyes?

>>3031743

Read the article linked in this thread, in particular the section on passive and active memory. It's worth noting that visual information is much harder to grasp as opposed to text so recreating someone else's face on paper without references is extremely difficult.

>>3031637
you can see images with your mind's eye without closing your eyes though... i say "see" very loosely. it's more like taking your attention away from what's in front of you. forming a presence-shaped absence is one weird way of putting it. anyway, mind's eye isn't just like seeing an image straight up.
also, how the fuck does aphantasia work? i mean, you must not be able to dream, right?
i always heard that in human development, the presence of a "mind's eye" is the only way we can categorize abstract mental symbols, and that understanding of past and future and language and whatever only comes after being able to catalog sensory snapshots in your mind.
that's to say, someone without a functioning mind's eye wouldn't be able to understand time or language or anything. can you really not fuckin' imagine what your favorite food tastes like? the texture of it in your mouth? you can't think of what it looks like? can't think of the name? can't understand this? can't ya recall the sensation of licking butterfinger stuck in your teeth? that should be vivid. it's all the same function in your brain.
to be frank, i think aphantasia is a load of shit, a misunderstanding of what "visualization" is.
but i don't know shit about shit so...

>>3031718
>Most people can imagine pictures and see them as if they were being captured by rheir real eyes.
Wait so you're telling me, if you imagine something you can see it with all its details, perfectly? That isn't how it works for me, but maybe I didn't interpret your post right

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>>3031718
>Most people can imagine pictures and see them as if they were being captured by rheir real eyes.

Fake and gay.

Betty Edwards already showed how you can photocopy any image from a photo with just a week of training. If the human mind could visualize like that we wouldn't have to learn the fundamentals since we could just copy the mental images.

What's really happening is that people are not consciously aware of the building blocks of reality and therefore can believe that they are looking at reality. The most simple example is dreaming. When we dream impossible architecture or dragons look plausible. You can dream that you're 5 years old again and think that it makes sense. This is because the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the part in charge of rationality and logic) is turned off during sleep.

Therefore, since you cannot discriminate between fake and real, the fake seems real. You're so ignorant of realism that you think what you visualize looks realistic. Some hypnotists used this theory to trick people into seeing fairies and ghosts.
http://www.whatsonmybrain.com/head-hacking-part-3/
Our perception of reality is not based on our senses, but on imagination and mental processes based on our senses.


It's no surprise that most supposed ""aphantasia"" people tend to be logicians. They logically dispel lousy images before they happen. They also have a very easy time spotting anatomy mistakes despite "not being able to visualize". This happens to me. When I'm dreaming and then suddenly realize "Wait a second, this perspective doesn't makes sense" "I don't know where does this light source comes from." "Her anatomy is off." I wake up because I dispel the illusion.
Just look at any beginner painting. They can't see their own mistakes. They think that their paintings look real because they don't understand light, form and perspective. Only until they learn those they realize how the image they perceived to be right was wrong.

>>3031637
I don't even understand this question. Are you sure you're not overthinking things?

>>3033480
This is fascinating because of its implications on userbases like /ic/.

Think about it; /ic/ despises people who don't respect form or perspective. But these people might have no ability to discriminate between well-constructed drawing and their shitty furry doodle. Their brain does not allow them to see much of a difference. They don't care because they aren't able to care.

They don't have relationship with masters you idolize (and art in general) like you do. Fetish for proper form only applies for a certain group of people, most notably artists themselves. You might work 30 years and become perfect, but there will be people who won't get it because they can't get aesthetically aroused by perfectly rendered forms.

>>3033493
>Fetish for proper form only applies for a certain group of people, most notably artists themselves. You might work 30 years and become perfect, but there will be people who won't get it because they can't get aesthetically aroused by perfectly rendered forms.

Absolutely correct. Normal people who aren't artistically trained cannot see the flaws in the art (unless the art is really really bad).

Once I realized this I stopped self flagellating and selling more art despite knowing that it had lots of flaws. Only other artists ever noticed them. I know we like to rip on Shadman for all his anatomy flaws, but the reality is that most of his fans aren't even aware of them.
Scott Adams makes clear how 2 people can look at the same picture as see 2 completely different things.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/158361670451/two-more-movies-on-one-screen

It's like the fps debate on videogames. 30fps vs 60fps. Only those who have deliberately looked at frames and tried to understand the differences can see it. They become so absurdly obsessed that they swear they cannot play anything under 144fps. And yet most people won't even realize that there is a difference unless it's explicitly spelled out to them.

>>3033480
>This happens to me. When I'm dreaming and then suddenly realize "Wait a second, this perspective doesn't makes sense" "I don't know where does this light source comes from." "Her anatomy is off." I wake up because I dispel the illusion.

This is an interesting post, but does this actually happen to you? You wake up because you see anatomy mistakes in your own dream? This might be the most quintessentially /ic/ thing ever, fucking lmao