THREAD: Aphantasia as an artist

Pretty much all of my art is tied to emotions rather than visual ideas. I used to draw a lot of angsty anime girls and now I draw melancholy autobio. Even if it's just girl facing left, there's usually an emotion I'm trying to get out. https://twitter.com/TheRubr/status/1306196373059104768

I think I draw *because* I can't see things in my mind. I never know what my art is going to look like until it's done and on the page. So I'll start with an idea that I want to express, 'I want to draw a pink haired girl being sad.' none of that is visual, it's just a feeling.

If the drawing is more complicated, I'll start writing out a list of things that I want to be in the drawing:

-Anime girl looking sad
-Pink hair
-Sat on a balcony
-Surrounded by houseplants
-Night time
-Modern athletic clothes
-Starry sky + clouds
-City backdrop
-aesthetic AF

So I've got my idea. Pink haired aesthetic angsty girl. I'll then spend 30 mins to an hour on google images or Pinterest gathering reference images for things like poses/hairstyles/plants/balconies.

A tricky thing for me is that the references need to be almost Exactly how they will be in the drawing. I can't rotate things in my mind so I need to see things how they will be. It can be So Hard to find the exact references I need but 3D models are an absolute godsend.

I use a pay-what-you-can software called pureref to put all my reference images together on one screen (this software is AMAZING I highly recommend it) and then I start drawing.

I'll start making loose marks on the page. I try and focus on technical things like line of action, silhouette, perspective (if applicable), body language/gesture and shape language to keep me on track. I do this all with a big brush and it's Super Messy

It's a pretty scientific-feeling process for me? Like I'm constantly talking to myself internally through the drawing. I'm measuring how far apart things are on the page and thinking about angles and the placement of things in relation to each other. I'm asking myself questions

So like, as an example, despite the fact that I've lived with dogs all my life I cannot draw a dog without looking at a reference image. It's honestly super embarrassing and I've been called out on it before lmaoo. But while I'm drawing a dog I'll ask myself questions like:

What is the relationship between the tip of the nose and the forehead?
How far from the bridge of the nose are the eyes?
How many times does the back leg bend?
How acute are the angles of the leg?
Where is the ribcage in relation to the knee?

I think this is also maybe one of the reasons I go straight to lineart from a blocky sketch instead of doing a more detailed problem-solving sketch like most artists do. I need to be able to see things as how they are going to be to know if they're working

I will make a Lot of mistakes and I'll have to draw things over and over throughout the process. Drawing for me is about discovering the image as I'm working on it rather than having an idea in my head that I want to translate to the page.

I think it's largely the reason why my drawings tend to be pretty stiff and my ideas are super basic. I often feel like my art is just a bastardisation of something I've seen before. I know on some level that's true for literally all art but idk it gets me down sometimes.

It gets easier to draw after you've been doing it this way for 15+ years. I started learning to draw by literally just copying what was in front of me. I'd print out pictures of anime girls and just copy them haha. I did that for years and eventually the muscle memory kind of...

set in and I was able to develop my own drawing style. But even still, I've drawn the same anime girl face for years but I still need reference every time. When I'm drawing my comics, I keep looking back at the comics I've already done to make sure the style is consistent.

It's super weird because I find it really hard to be like 'I'm drawing an eye'. It feels more like 'I'm drawing a shape where the lines of the top eyelid are slightly more curved than the bottom and they fade out towards the centre' etc etc etc

Improvement is slow but it happens over time. Sometimes I get sad about it because I think how much easier things would be if I could just like, draw a doorknob without having to look up an image of a doorknob (and then apply that to every single minute aspect of the drawing)

Drawing is an Extremely Difficult and Slow process for me. I wish I could just daydream and come up with cool and outlandish ideas for drawings but most of my illustrations end up being 'girl facing left'. I'm trying to get better at this by looking up more dynamic references.

But yeah I think my process is still similar to a lot of other artists, it's just more pain-staking and emotion-based rather than image-based haha. :> It involves a lot of me trying to problem-solve not through imagery but through asking questions.