There are two types of imagination. Spatial ability. Visual ability.

Train both. At the same time. That is how vision works.

When you look at something, it has spatial information. When you imagine something, it should have spatial information too. If it is only a flat picture in your head, you are not imagining. You are remembering a photo.

Taste is only as good as your vision.

Walk outside.

Feel the space around you. Not the names of things. The space. How far the building is. How the tree sits in front of it. How the ground comes toward your feet.

Feel the space in your body. You can meditate and feel the inside of your body. The volume of the chest. The distance from your hand to your face.

Feel the distance between things and yourself. Walk around. Compare objects. This is closer. That is farther. This is bigger than that, even though it looks smaller. Feel the buildings. The trees. The textures.

You are not studying. You are waking the sense you will draw with.

When you draw from life, don't draw what you see. Draw what you feel.

Two eyes. Depth, distance, the volume of a thing. That spatial sense is what you draw with.

Vision does not take in a picture all at once. You make a map of the whole first. Low-res. The big relationships. Then the fovea scans for detail. The fovea is the central pit of the retina. It gives you sharp detail in a small area. It takes that information and relates it back to the whole. You fill the missing pieces. You keep checking so the parts stay obedient to the structure.

Drawing is that process. A low-res map of the whole plus a high-res local renderer. The renderer is the fovea. This is how human vision works. Not a camera.

From life, that is the order. You map the whole. Then the fovea fills the detail. You do not trace the edge. You feel the space with both eyes. You scan. You put down what you feel.

From imagination it is the same process, reversed. You start with the detail. The high-res local. Then you fill in the blanks around it. You invent the map of the whole so the parts stay obedient to the structure.

When you draw from imagination, imagine something and draw it.

Do not care if it looks good. You are not making a picture. You are drawing what you feel. What you feel is your imagination. There is no difference.

See the lines on the page before you draw them.

Look at the paper. Empty. Imagine something on it. Anything. A person. A room. A pattern. A single line that already has a direction.

Then draw it.

It is okay if you don't complete the image. It is okay if it is only a pattern. It is okay if it dies after three marks.

The only thing that matters is that you see something on the page and then you try to draw it.

Then you can practice rotating objects in 3D.

See a thing in real life and feel through to the other side. The back of a mug. The far wall of a room. The hidden shoulder.

A handy trick. To feel the back of a head I had to close the neck off. Until the volume was closed I could not feel through it. The form was an open cup. It leaked.

When you feel a 3D object you can feel the inside contours and the outside. Close it, and you can turn it.

Practice this in memory. Imagine a thing. Rotate it. Feel the other side. Not a spinning icon. A volume you are inside of, and around.

Don't force this. You will burn out.

Do what comes natural. Imagine whatever feels good to you.

If you like people, go into your memories. What's beautiful to you. A happy memory. A sad one. What does the beach look like to you. What's a yellow memory. What's a green one. Let the thing that wants to be seen, be seen. Then draw it. Or don't. The seeing is the training.

Then, if you want, a specific study. People. Over and over. Different positions. Different rotations. One subject you love, turned in space until you know it when it isn't in front of you.

You are improving your vision.