I am definitely not aphantasic. Interestingly, one of my sisters is, and is also a much better artist than me, insofar as she can copy a reference image photorealistically. She cannot art at all without reference images. She'll have to find the right ones and then photoshop them together to make a picture, and she doesn't have an innate sense of layout or composition to guide her. I've thus had the interesting experience of acting as a sort of prosthetic visual imagination for an aphantasic artist, even though I myself have the drawing skills of an average kindergartner.
(Example: The library was holding a bookmark design contest for its summer reading program. The theme was something like "Worlds Connect At Your Library". One drew / colored on an entry form which basically had a box for the design on one side and then the spaces for one's personal info on the other. My design was super simple, a bright yellow flying saucer at the top with a dramatic curved yellow swoosh across the dark sky, leading down to a bright Earth with rather smudged and blobby continents. My sister's design was a very large red book with a gold gothic-font title, standing up open with a wizard's hat and hand showing from behind it, the hand holding a wand from which a spray of stars went up to an Earth above the wizard's head. Her Earth was much better than mine, her details far more detailed... but she could not decide what line the spray of stars should follow. Straight, S-shaped, she tried various ones in Photoshop, but none looked good. So she asked me for help, and I drew her a pair of simple fair-line curves with two sweeps of my hand. If the spray of stars looked suspiciously like my UFO trail in silhouette, well, we were in different age divisions and we both won, and anyway hers was made up of individual stars once she finished drawing it, instead of just being a swoosh.)
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I am definitely not aphantasic. Interestingly, one of my sisters is, and is also a much better artist than me, insofar as she can copy a reference image photorealistically. She cannot art at all without reference images. She'll have to find the right ones and then photoshop them together to make a picture, and she doesn't have an innate sense of layout or composition to guide her. I've thus had the interesting experience of acting as a sort of prosthetic visual imagination for an aphantasic artist, even though I myself have the drawing skills of an average kindergartner.
(Example: The library was holding a bookmark design contest for its summer reading program. The theme was something like "Worlds Connect At Your Library". One drew / colored on an entry form which basically had a box for the design on one side and then the spaces for one's personal info on the other. My design was super simple, a bright yellow flying saucer at the top with a dramatic curved yellow swoosh across the dark sky, leading down to a bright Earth with rather smudged and blobby continents. My sister's design was a very large red book with a gold gothic-font title, standing up open with a wizard's hat and hand showing from behind it, the hand holding a wand from which a spray of stars went up to an Earth above the wizard's head. Her Earth was much better than mine, her details far more detailed... but she could not decide what line the spray of stars should follow. Straight, S-shaped, she tried various ones in Photoshop, but none looked good. So she asked me for help, and I drew her a pair of simple fair-line curves with two sweeps of my hand. If the spray of stars looked suspiciously like my UFO trail in silhouette, well, we were in different age divisions and we both won, and anyway hers was made up of individual stars once she finished drawing it, instead of just being a swoosh.)