Blank Canvas, Tangled Knots
Angst of an Illustrator With Hypophantasia
Last year, I saw a therapist to help me create art again. My nervous system had jammed me into a corner for each of the last 6 books I’d illustrated. Over time, we solved lots of issues and I came away wonderfully changed, but still had a creative block.
Asking the right questions
On the weekend I turned 62, I was transcribing the piece of my memoir about my first friend at age 11, who was so skilled and able to draw anything from her mind. I spoke aloud, ‘She’s one of the lucky ones who can draw anything without looking at a picture.’ Wait. Why have I always thought of her as lucky? I know lots of luckies like her. After recently reading about paying attention to inner senses and feelings, I was reminded to stop. I freeze in my mental tracks, as if slapped, jarred enough to ask the question for the first time, ‘Wait - Surely, most artists are like me, and she’s the exception, right? Why can she draw from her head and I can’t?’
A quick scan of my Denver illustrator friends in SCBWI, the illustrator/writer organization, and I remember watching them sketch characters and scenes effortlessly during meetings, or doodle custom drawings while signing books. Oddly, I couldn’t. I always withdrew. Maybe I don’t practice enough? Needing photos is a sham. Why can’t I draw like all the others? Is it just ME?
I swing back to embarrassed times of drawing for students. After all, I was in schools as a guest illustrator - but being asked to draw something was my most feared moment. A true gut-punch. I was ashamed at the flip-pad scratches, as hundreds of faces fell every time. There’s no eraser for fat marker.
Why do I need photos, pictures, to draw anything?
After realizing I must look at something in order to draw, and even traced images to help me learn as a kid, I am acutely aware something is wrong (I mean, something else is wrong with my brain - no surprise, lol!). Stunned, I turn to whom my brother calls his ‘Googley girlfriend’. The search begins…’can’t draw without looking at pictures.’ I shuffle through snippets of sites and AI brevity barfing up generic articles on 3D spatial awareness. Then the word ‘Aphantasia’ pops in. New browser: definition of Aphantasia, please?
Whoa. Do I…? I immediately take a few of the online tests. Holy cow! A blaring beacon bursts out into a dark ocean. In fact, it parts the seas. Maybe even epic movie soundtrack. My husband’s eyes virtually roll at this point, as my mouth and heart rate fly off the handle in astonishment.
I’m a Hypophantasic
I visualize dim, fleeting and pale images that fade to grey pretty quick. The more I concentrate, the faster they’re gone. Exhaustion sets in when trying hard. I pivot sharply. Everything in me screeches to a halt and does a whiplashing 180 turn, as I look back at my entire artistic career teeming with inner struggle, angst, inferiority, and soul pain. This news is validating, vindication! I feel relief, and even joy, as the feeling of failure lifts. I rant out loud about how incredible this is to find, until my husband notes that I retired from illustrating anyway. Ouch.
Knowing enough about myself to ask Googley girl another question, sure enough - no surprise - mine is ‘learned’ from severe emotional/physical neglect, the worst trauma, ADHD, dyslexia, etc. Maybe even connected to my brain’s early habit of dissociation and repression for survival.
New landscape
Alright. I need to understand all this (me taking off on a rabbit trail). Are there other artists like me? Book illustrators, even? Oh God, please? Scrambling to discover more from artists and writers with it, I devour aphantasia.com. Reading other artist’s stories is as if someone handed me a hot English tea on a cool rainy day. Thank you so very much. So affirming. I learn some helpful methods of accommodating the visualization gap, but more so, I recognize so many of my own workarounds.
Yes, I’m a traditionally published picture book illustrator (7 of them) and New York Times #1 best-selling illustrator of The Kissing Hand - which was my only book done without a timeline. Not rushed, not stressed. There’s something in that.
Methods, tools and workarounds
Gratefully, I learned the rules of color, composition, design, value, perspective, and type as a graphic artist when I apprenticed in a print shop at age 19. This is likely my most valuable framework.
My biggest ‘Aha!’ in all this? I create/sketch the same way as Glen Keane, the Disney artist of the Little Mermaid. Without photo references, I scribble lots of nutty lines, and erase and scribble and erase until I find the right ones. I’m good at tangled string. Like other artists/writers with little or no inner sight, I rabidly collect and archive photo images (not just 1,000’s of refs when illustrating a book, but nonstop images of everything…on my phone); I collect lists of fun/unusual words, phrases from great books, collect books themselves.
Procreate on a big iPad Pro gives me the warm fuzzies, to easily rearrange and size compositions and fine-tune sketched characters. I write lots of notes. I’m wordy. I choose colors based on theory and emotion, not on visualizing relationships. And apparently my characters convey emotion - because I feel the character, rather than visualize it. I play with tiniest adjustments until the eyes come alive and say what I want.
Storyboards themselves juxtapose excitement with agony. Spreads, page-turns, and ‘show, don’t tell’ mantras seem insurmountable when you can’t visualize. Still, we lean on conceptualizing, right? The opportunity to create a whole book is wonderful! To plan a storyboard I review stacks of books, and search thousands of photos to give me ideas and references. Thumbnail sketches are a giant puddle of scratches and tangled string that only I can decipher. As I progress, and ideas form in stages, I erase unwanted lines, zoom way in, and then draw parts and pieces of many photo references to come up with each scene and character. Though I tried methods of many other illustrators I knew, I could not speed up nor make this easier. With Procreate it is faster, but I still take WAY longer than publishers and agent expect. I definitely frustrate myself. I chalked it all up to a stressful and simultaneous full-time job (pay the bills). Plus poor health.
Why watercolor? I think I took to watercolor over other media precisely because the subject can be clearly defined in pencil first, and masking fluid applied to save the whites - there’s no risk of guessing where the paint goes. With careful preplanning, the pressure’s off the painting itself. I love to let the liquid do it’s own ‘abstractness’. Also, graphic artists before the computer age made the best watercolorists, because everything revolved around ‘saving the whites and working backwards’, mental gymnastics themselves.
Visual inspiration: I read that Aphantasia can be like seeing something for the first time again, and I concur. It’s likely why I collect natural treasures like rocks, acorns, seeds, feathers, dried grasses, leaves, flowers, and feathers - all arranged in tall glass vases and jars on shelves in my studio - small things that captivate me with big awe and wonder of nature. I consider this joy of seeing tiny wonders a most precious gift. I often feel like a kid.
Overlapping and discovered neurodiversities
Dreams: Sometimes I remember dreams, sometimes there’s color, but not ones I can name. Odd. They’re never vivid or very clear, but most often I’d ‘fall asleep’ mid-crisis or mid-story. I can hear and feel the scene continue, but I fight off ‘sleep’, until the grey covers my sight. I go blind, it goes quiet, the dream fizzles. I JUST connected that to how I visualize when awake - holy cats!
People: I can’t remember faces well, and can’t picture my family. This has also annoyed my boss (“Oh, that’s the CEO?”). Not surprisingly, I was the family picture-taker and fact-hoarder: in a family of 8 kids, I know everyone’s address and birthdate, and built an online family tree to eventually find long-lost half-siblings. Am just seeing this need for ‘hard facts’ is valuable.
Time-blind: I have no sense of how much time has passed, so can be late a lot, and lean on reminders and a timer. Don’t ask about work punctuality. And maybe much of that is ADD.
Memory: Remembering childhood events for my memoir boils down to concepts, a few early dim images, but not the feelings or emotions from them, no clear visuals, no details about locations. Just the settings and big things. This initially made my memoir more like a fact-telling news story without any emotional context, like The Glass Castle, so I rewrote it by filling in the missing emotional pieces of feeling in hindsight, after some therapy. Even further, because that didn’t feel completely genuine, I rewrote it again in verse - poetry - which I can hook bits of real emotion to, and draw my dim emotions out even more.
Sheesh (eye-roll). I can already imagine eyes glazing over as I attempt to share this. Not many folks care for the nitty-gritty of neurodiversity or our human inner workings. I realize that everyone is neurodivergent in some way - all different, having unique and quirky oddities that make us human. We’re all weird.
Moving forward
After a lifetime of struggle with producing art I see why my illustrations are more realistic and less playful, why illustrating takes me longer than others, why the angsty struggle, why drawing itself feels so HARD. Why joy died. Why I stopped illustrating books or creating any art and took up knitting. There’s a name for the angst. Now I’m dying to tell my agent and artist friends the reason for, well, my ‘failure’. Holy cow. I now have the reason to revisit my amazing therapist, who brought much resolution and healing and peace, but no release for artistic block.
I’m trying to figure out where to go from here, you know? Maybe nowhere right now. Maybe knowing is everything, and I can rest in that. Nonetheless, this new knowledge has given me hope: I still have a gift, I CAN create more art, I don’t have to ‘retire.’ Now, I’m determined not to give up illustrating my own stories in my time and not anyone else’s. Like my first book.
Oh. Lastly, you delighted Pictionary game-players who insist I join, and eager students in school assembly gatherings - stick figures will always be my mantra. To your great disappointment and my humiliation, it’s all I had. But no more. I will now tell you, ‘NO’ and name why (I hear Handel’s Messiah).