Artists/Designers with Aphantasia

I’m a graphic designer/artist/animator.
When I start a project, I can tell myself that it’ll be in XYZ style because I’ve seen it somewhere and that’s what comes up in my thoughts. I can’t actually SEE it. I KNOW it though. So where is that coming from? I must have visually referenced it at some point, as I know that’s what I want to recreate. I can’t shut my eyes and see it. It’s just hovering around somewhere as what, exactly??
I can’t see it but I ‘see’ it enough to recognise it’s the look I’m after. Make it make sense!
Is it a recall problem?

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I’m also an artist with aphantasia. From what I understand, people who can’t visualize somehow have the ability to do tasks that are generally thought of as needing visualization. So we can describe what something looks like, we just can’t see it in our heads. Obviously these tasks don’t truly require visualization, just a desire to do them, and persistence.
We’ve had aphantasia our whole lives and never knew it. But that means without realizing it, we’ve created ways for our brains to do what they do without visualizing and that’s amazing!!! Now that I know about aphantasia , I do wonder how I’m able to do what I do, and I think about it every day. But I also like to take a minute every so often and just pat myself on the back because I’m a visual artist who can’t visualize and that is truly just awesome!

I’m also an artist and love what you said! Do you have any tips for drawing things without a reference?

I come from a family successful artists and designers. I was the black sheep being verbal and incapable of drawing. But art having been important in my home growing up I have also spent much time in art museums, both at home and when I travel. Here is what is curious. In my 60s my wife got me to sign up for a sculpture class at a prestigious art academy that happened to be close to where we were living at the time. I had never sculpted a human figure in my life, but my very first standing nude was remarkably good. Over the next few years until we moved I was a regular student in the sculpture class. The experience was always very visceral, the feel of the clay and the look of the arm or the leg or the back but never a scene of the figure as a whole nor and no understanding of where or why my sculpture as a whole did not reflect the model standing before me The last pieces that I did were not really improved over the first. And I still can’t draw.

I am also an artist with aphantasia, and Robert Avila, like you, I find drawing in 2 dimensions very difficult but I took to clay sculpting like I was born to it. i believe it has something to do with drawing being in two-D, in the same way that “pictures in the mind” are , or visualizationis, where as sculpting is more of a whole concept, multidimensional, yes, visceral thing , as you said.

I draw when I read… in the margins. I think I’m trying to visualize, but because I can’t visualize in my mind, I draw.