I almost wonder if artistic training tends to make you not get better at visualizing stuff. Why should you? It's right there in front of you and you're turning

I almost wonder if artistic training tends to make you not get better at visualizing stuff. Why should you? It's right there in front of you and you're turning it into what you want it to be with your pencils/pens/brushes/stylus. I am a pro artist and my visualization is mediocre at best most of the time. I'm not aphantasiastic but I am sure not one of those artists who can imagine an entire drawing perfectly and "trace" it onto the page. Every now and then the right neurons connect and I can visualize stuff, sometimes sober, sometimes not. Smoking a sativa-dominant strain of marijuana sometimes gives me a huge boost to my internal visualization but I almost never do this because it also tends to make me super paranoid. There's a graph to be made similar to the XKCD Ballmer Peak one. [1] And then there is that one artist at Termite Terrace[2] who got in a car accident, hit his head, and suddenly had that imagine-and-trace skill. Brains are weird. 1: https://www.xkcd.com/323/ https://www.xkcd.com/323/ 2: the unofficial name of the 1940s Warner Brothers animated shorts studio