The solution for drawing better from imagination?

I naively thought the art/animation part of my major would be easy (as a sheltered freshman/sophomore in the pre-program). This was until I took my first university-level art class, Intro to Art and Drawing. 

Turns out, I was worse at drawing than everyone in the class, including the students who were taking the class for a general education requirement! It was quite embarrassing and discouraging as well. 

From high school, I remember drawing Pokemon in my sketchbook on quiet Friday nights at home, thinking about how easy it was. I remember doodling constantly on my notes, sketching all sorts of things, but mostly nature. I remember I won a tiny little art contest on Serebii to design an Eeveelution. Thus, in college, I was so confused as to why drawing for class was so insanely difficult for me. My professor suggested that I was trying too hard to treat art like a math problem, which was definitely true -- but it took me a long time to figure out what she meant by that. 

As a kid, my grandfather (mom's side) wanted to give me drawing lessons, seeing as we shared an affinity for drawing. But I resisted. I wanted to draw cool dragons and amusement park rides, not boring old flower vases! I cringe at this now, naturally. I'd love to draw beautiful renderings of flowers -- especially because when designing fantasy bedrooms, I often want flowers on the tables! 

So part of it was that I just didn't have any practice drawing mundane things, like still lifes. And I always avoided drawing people, too. 

Then I took Intro to 3D Graphics and wow that class was punishing; I got an A- but I really sucked at it. But hey, good 3D art is based on good 2D skills, right? 

After that class I started practicing drawing a lot more. Very quickly, I realized I had a knack for copying illustrations. Not tracing, copying. As in, if it was a cartoon-like illustration, or even a more realistic fantasy illustration, I could copy it in pencil. This was the first time I could actually see myself making a future with my art. I was even told by a few people that they would buy stuff made by me! 

Then I took figure drawing. I was taking it alongside calculus 2 and computational theory, among a few other courses. And I. Got. OWNED. My figure and gesture drawings were atrociously, comically bad. Lowest grade in the class on both the midterm and the final. I did raise my grade from a C to an A due to the sheer amount of extra credit work I completed. So, I actually have the achievement of going from the lowest grade in the class (around 73%) to the highest grade in the class (109%). Even so, I still sucked! 

My professor said something that really stuck with me -- You have to avoid being SYMBOLIC when drawing. If you are drawing a muscle and think "yes, this is a bicep", your brain will immediately go to what it THINKS a bicep looks like, instead of what the model right in front of your face actually looks like. And since mental models are imperfectly constructed for a good 99% of people -- because they are more abstract than concrete -- your drawing is going to look like hot garbage. 

By then I realized that anything organic was extremely difficult for me to draw. I could copy the lines with cartoony stuff and it would look good. But I couldn't do the same thing with lines on humans. My professor even pointed out that I was relying too much on line, which is why my figure drawings looked so, well, cartoony. 

But even with cartoons I would fail if I didn't have an exact reference to copy. Case in point: Anthros are rarely drawn front-facing. So if I tried, and didn't have a reference, the drawing would blow up in my face. 

I've always been a heavy daydreamer, extremely visual, with a great imagination -- almost hyperphantasic but not quite. So what was giving? I would walk through the halls of my high school dreaming of waterfalls and jaguars all around me, but I couldn't draw either correctly. 

The answer lies in Monika Zagrobelna's amazing article here, called "Why is it so hard to draw from imagination? Here's how to do it!"

She explains the science behind this much better than I can, but basically: You don't have as good of a visual mental model of most things as you think you do. 

During freshman orientation at BYU, a few of us were talking about how "if I could paste what's in my imagination onto paper, I'd be really good at drawing". Nope, wrong, because that would imply that the only thing limiting your art skills is...lack of manual dexterity? That's not what's limiting most people. 

The problem is that your mental image is blurry. 

Like I can close my eyes and see a beautiful walkway through an estuary. I can hear the crashing of the waves and watch the seagulls. I can see the blue hue of the sky. I can touch the metal handrails on the sides of the walkway. I can even read the informational kiosks that talk about the nature of the area, and see the distant mountains. 

That doesn't mean I can draw it though. 

Consider the following: 

• Do I know where every single pockmark and scratch in the handrail is?
• Do I know the precise angles that make up a seagull's face? Sure, I know that it has an orange beak and a red spot on it. I can see it. But do I know exactly where the red spot is, or does it change or get inconsistent when I try to bring it closer to me and scrutinize it? Do I understand exactly how the beak curves, the wings fold, the feathers flutter in the breeze? 
• When walking to the ocean in my imagination, I can see the sand. I can even touch the contours of the footprints in it, and feel the warmth on the grains from the sun, and watch grains blow away in the breeze, and notice as the sand gets wetter when I get closer to shore. But can I see the placement of every grain? The pieces that sparkle? Can I figure out based on the angle of the sun where exactly every shadow should fall on every footprint? Do I know what shape the sand tends to blow away into, when a breeze picks up, and do I know how the individual grains look as a collective whole? When I get to the ocean, sure I can see and feel the spray on my face. But do I understand the intricacies of how it arcs, how seafoam flies into the air, how foam floats in various patterns along the water's surface? Do I know the shape of ripples and waves? The exact shape, not a vague idea? Moreover, is this image consistent and does not change if I get distracted by something else in my imagined scene, and then return to look at it? 

If you legitimately can mentally see all the details, and they are unchanging, then the only confounding variable preventing you from becoming a great artist is just manual dexterity, which is easy to train. People have learned to draw and paint with their mouths and feet. You can absolutely train manual dexterity. At that point, you should have a perfect reference to copy in your head, and it should be actualized easily in reality. You should also, if given a nice rigged 3D model from TurboSquid, be able to pose it in an aesthetically pleasing, realistic way (with the only confounding variable being your hypothetical lack of ability to use 3D modeling software). 

With figure drawing, it's ridiculously easy to get so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of visual data available that you subconsciously resort to drawing what you see symbolically. I'm pretty sure this is what happened to me in DESIL 131. 

The solution to this problem, I think, is to build a much better visual database of what you want to draw. I want to draw tons of dragons. So I need to look at a TON of art of dragons, to understand how their faces look at various angles. You don't want to pick up the pencil, attempt to draw the vague idea, then continually erase and re-draw until you get it right. In other words, I think visually being able to see and rotate something in your mind, with consistent details, is what will make your imaginative drawings a lot better -- as well as drawing challenging stuff like realistic human figures and cloth. It's like a turnaround in animation. Have an image of a dragon in your head. Understand how the lines and angles work from different points of view. This is hard work, but I think it's going to be SO worth it in the end. 

References can help, but you can't just rely on references, because at some point you're going to need to draw a pose or object that you can't find a good enough reference for. Thus, references are just a way of making your mental model of an object more concrete. 

My goal is to doubt my mental model whenever it starts becoming too symbolic. Sure, a dragon facing you will have a foreshortened snout, but that's too symbolic. I need to actually be able to SEE how the lines work in my head. At that point? You're basically copying a reference. Easy. The mental visualization is the hardest work of all, especially with tools like line stabilization in Photoshop. In computer science, we lean into abstraction for object-oriented programming. In art, we need to steer clear of it. 

I think this will work, anyway. 

IDK anything about aphantasia so if you have that, I can't help you, but it doesn't seem to be an obstacle for Uncomfortable from Drawabox. Maybe that course will have more info on that. And I'm still trying to make my drawings less sucky myself, so I may re-evaluate this in the future. 

I'm hoping to build an effective model of art instruction that will make it a lot easier, you know? But I have to complete it first. And I have to get good first. It'll be messy but it'll happen. 

added on 3/22: I don't think you NEED a perfect mental model of something to draw it. What you do need is at least a temporary mental model that you build based on various references relating to your subject. This has already helped me to see some improvements on my figure drawings, though they still have a long way to go.