@nazgul The only one I know of in my bloodline who had it was my great uncle on my mother's side. He tried to teach me when I was little but I just don't have the ability to translate what I see to a 2-dimensional piece of paper.
I'm a very good photographer with a good eye and have been since I was 12. But that's obviously unrelated to drawing or sculpting.
I had plenty of time to analyze the talent in 25 years of marriage. Part of it is the ability to look at a scene or object and immediately see the most important features that need to be represented in a drawing. She could take a pencil and sketch pad, look at someone's face, draw 5 or 6 curved lines in ten seconds, and you'd say, "Oh, that's Bob." Wtf? This is inconceivable to me.
I always wished there was some kind of brain to brain interface that would let me see the world as she did for a minute or two.
@shuttersparks I only discovered a few years ago that there’s this thing called aphantasia, where you don’t “see” things in your head. Or more accurately, I discovered that all those folks talking about what they saw when they remembered something weren’t using a metaphor, they actually saw something! I have a good eye for whether something looks good. But I can’t visualize it in advance. As a kid I could draw figures...I just never knew what kind of person I was creating.
@shuttersparks It skipped a generation. My mother has it, my kids have it, but I don’t!