Several bits of good advice I've taken to extremes or otherwise made pathological in the past.
Art teachers rightfully warn against drawing referencing other's drawings: You'll add your own errors on top of theirs. Perhaps anatomy mistakes, perhaps oversimplified symbols, the possible drawbacks are many. You want to understand the 3D shape of the thing you're drawing, which is much harder to glean from other artists work - you can't rotate a painting in 3D. This is all good advice.
However.
It's also perfectly okay to reference other artist's work. How did they hint at small details? Shade? Stroke width? Did they use "symbols" that hint elegantly at the underlying structure? What did they exaggerate and simplify? Study life to understand the underlying shape of the mouth when someone is biting their lip. Study other artists to figure out how the hell they managed to put that to paper when it's small enough on the paper that you can't render it in detail.
This advice always rubbed me the wrong way, and I regret that I did not dig deeper for so long. Drawing from reference makes you good at drawing from reference, but I desire the ability to draw from memory and imagination as well. Worse, when using a reference, I'd find myself slavishly copying details. Perhaps with grids, perhaps by rule of thumb. This was a good practice of measurement, perhaps, but never tested my memory of said measurements.
Every major or minor mistake jumped out at me, demanding immediate fixes, overwhelming me and making me hate my artistic output. Each mistake would further distract me from learning from the mistakes I'd made just previously, leaving me open to repeating them. Drowing in too many measurements, I was unlikely to remember any new ratios or shapes. References are good, and perhaps you should always use them - but in moderation, not to be slavishly copied.
An exercise I found useful for practice:
- Review a reference image, study it
- Attempt to draw the image from memory of having just referenced it.
- Review the drawing - to see where it doesn't match the reference.
- Determine the largest mistakes that were made, and what fixes would be appropriate. Measure and determine ratios here.
- Attempt to draw the image again from memory, this time bearing in mind my previous mistakes and the corrections I need to make.
- Repeat from step 3.
I found this much more effective at focusing my attention on macroscopic mistakes and learning correct anatomy, without that knowledge being immediately pushed out of my brain by wanting to correct minor imperfections of hair shading. The process is iterative and self-adjusting: When I don't remember my proportions and ratios, I repeat my mistakes and relearn from them. When I do effectively learn from my mistakes, it ceases to be my largest error, and my new largest error will likely be fresh material.
I don't quite have Aphantasia, but my ability to generate mental images is extremely limited. At one point I assumed memory palaces were metaphorical. They also seemed counterproductive and pointless despite attempts to use them, both before and after realizing they were not so metaphorical. This is all to say: in general, my mind and my memory works with symbols and abstractions, not visually. My memory is great with "novel" or "interesting" symbols and abstractions, but can struggle with having immediately discarded anything "boring". For an artist this is a weak point, but perhaps not insurmmountable.
Take the humble road sign. Simple geometric shapes and colors. I can easily remember seeing e.g. a 40mph road sign. But:
- What color was it, exactly? White/yellow/orange? Dirty? Clean? Reflective? Kinda dim?
- What was the exact text? "Speed Limit" over "40" or "40" over "Speed limit"? Centered? Left justified? Right?
- Was the font serrif or sans-serrif? Allcaps? Monospaced?
- How was it mounted? Metal pole? Screws through the center of the sign? Any rust streaks? Two poles? Concrete pole?
- What were the borders like? White black white?
- What were the corners like? Rounded? By how much? For both the metal plate and the drawn border, or just the drawn border?
- If there was a "Trucks" speed limit, was it above or bellow the regular speed limit sign?
- If there was a school zone indicator on the sign, was it part of the same plate? Above? Bellow? Same color? Any lights? Orientation thereof?
I am likely to draw a complete blank on most of these details having immediatley discarded them as irrelevant to the symbol, mere seconds after having passed the sign.
However, I can choose to conciously study these details, memorize them - perhaps still symbolicly - and generate faint mental images based on said details. They have all the fidelity of a 2% opacity paint-by-numbers image where I can perhaps label the colors, but that's technically a mental image. I also say this as someone who occasionally has incredibly vivid dreams I'd imagine would give any Hyperphantasiadic a run for their money. It's quite rare - maybe once a year, or once every couple years - but it happens.
I would be hard pressed to give good descriptions of the appearances of my own loved ones. And yet I can easily recognized them. I definitely don't have Prosopagnosia.
