I keep trying to learn to draw but I simply suck at it no matter what. I’d love to learn how to draw all kinds of things like architectural drawings, or cute designs, etc. But I can barely even copy something if I have the picture right in front of me.
I’d like to take a class that teaches the basics of drawing that I could follow along with using Procreate or something. Does anyone have good recommendations for someone who seems unable to gain any proficiency at drawing?
I’ve been given this advice my whole life and I’ve always hated it because it’s never worked for me.
I used to love drawing as a kid. I was always sketching things. I got a lot of praise for my artwork and was told that I was highly skilled for my age.
The problem was, I mostly just copied other works of art. I wasn’t very good at drawing something unique. And even with decades of practice, my skill never improved. I never figured out how to draw unique styles, shading, or details. Despite my “skill,” I eventually gave up drawing altogether.
As an older man looking back, I realize now that I was focused on technical details I could actually see and I could never recreate them from a mental image. I never had an artist’s mind. I was just really good at copying exact details from other art. I could’ve even draw based on a photo, because I didn’t know what details to include and what to exclude; there was too much information in a photograph and my brain couldn’t parse it all.
To this day, I can mimic other works of art very well, but I can’t create unique works, and no amount of practice will fix that. I’m just not artistically inclined. I can’t visualize a scene well enough to create it from scratch.
You may simply have aphantasia. The inability to picture things clearly in your “mind’s eye”. This ranges from being able to VR your imagination into the real world like it’s something that’s really there, to only ‘seeing’ a faint idea of what it is you’re thinking of, all the way to not seeing anything at all.
My mother was blessed with hyperphantasia, and art came easier for her than most - but it was always better with practice.
I most definitely have aphantasia (trauma based), but I’ve been able to practice ‘seeing’ things in my minds eye by taking pictures, practicing remembering the picture, drawing it from memory, and then comparing it afterwards. I’m no photocopier like you seem to be, I mostly deal with engineering drawings all day so I think my mind has simply adapted to putting together sets of rules like a puzzle.