Alison Taylor

I do art everyday and I love it and wouldn't change a thing. I never realized that I had aphantasia until about 5 years ago (in my 30s now) . I do remember growing up and when ever I was asked to be 'creative' and draw whatever I would freeze. 'What do you mean 'draw whatever'??' The teachers would tell me to be creative, and use my imagination, or worse, whatever I could see in my head. I still freeze on those kind of prompts now, with those drawing party games my friends always try to rope me into because I'm good at art. you don't even have to be an artist to meet the objectives, but they are so stressful for me. And this is all because I NEED reference and I NEED an idea that's solid before I can even attempt. In school I would draw styles from shows I liked, and I would draw the same poses, and the same clothes, on the same characters. Folks would see and exclaim  'wooow you're soo creative' but I didn't feel creative, to me I had no imagination I was just copying. Classmates would often tell me they could see stuff in their head but could never draw it so they were envious of me. I would just tell them to practice (which is still correct) but I never knew they were being literal, I always thought they meant they just had vivid ideas about things they wanted to draw, which I would then misconstrue as creativity. I'd think they are more creative than me but just don't want to apply it. Semi related this is kind of a hot topic in the art community. A LOT of younger artists for some reason see using reference as cheating in some form. Even tracing is bad to them, when tracing is just another tool to help you with specific objectives. Using reference wasn't really taught when I was in grade school and I would assume its the same now because I still see it pop up from time to time on twitter. My point here is that if you still have some passion or inkling to do art, give it another go, and use all the reference you want. I just do google image search thats pretty generic 'backgrounds outdoor' and then maybe find a stock photo of a person on a horse and now you just need a ref of an outfit or some armor (type a random year) to put them in and bam you got yourself an original idea. Don't be ashamed about it :) art is a journey you can start any time and there really no 'wrong way' to do it.