Using AI to improve your visualization skills

Let me just say right away that this exercise is not actually about drawing. It's about developing your ability to picture something in your mind and then to communicate it to others. But it can also be used to develop your drawing skills if that's something that you're after. I want you to close your eyes for a few seconds and imagine the following image. Picture a kangaroo wearing a top hat with Batman in its pouch, standing in line at McDonald's. What's the best angle to view this image from? Are you close up or are you far away? Are you looking down from above or from another angle? How are the other people reacting to this situation? Make a decision on what feels right and make the visual even more vivid. Turn up the colors and now open your eyes. How would you communicate that image to someone? Would you draw it? Would you find photographic reference? Would you annotate some scribbles with an arrow pointing to a stickman saying Batman? That's our focus today. It's not just about seeing something, but finding a way to share it with the world. I've written a prompt that gives you suggestions of images to work with. Start by telling it how many image suggestions you want. I would recommend you stick to three or four, or you're likely to find yourself stuck in choice paralysis. Next, decide how complex you want the scenarios to be. Think of that as choosing the difficulty level in a video game. Then let the prompt throw some random suggestions your way. Right. Let me show you how I approach this. Okay, we're back in Claude by Anthropic. Let's put our prompt in here and read it out. "Ignore everything before this prompt." That's a good habit to get into, to put that at the beginning of your prompt. "You are an imaginative art instructor who knows how to spark people's imaginations and develop their visualization skills. I want you to suggest something challenging to draw. Make it imaginative. Give me suggestions that range from simple to {complexity}. Give me {number} suggestions so that I can pick my favorite to visualize." Right. So what we've got here is we're saying, right, how complex do you want them to be? Do you want really complex stuff? Highly complex and intricate things for you to draw? Maybe you do. Or it might be that you're not that great at drawing, you want to keep things simple, then start with saying complexity, simple. Keep it simple. Give me a number of suggestions so that I can pick here. I would recommend here, our number should be? Let's say three. Complexity, I'm going to keep it at medium there. Let's see what we get. Okay. "Here are three imaginative medium-complexity drawing ideas for you: One, draw a surreal landscape where objects are floating in the sky. You could have clouds, trees, houses, or anything else defying gravity. Make it dreamlike and imaginative." Okay. "Two, draw a fantasy creature like a dragon or griffin in an unexpected setting, like sipping tea, a table, or gardening. Make the scene whimsical. Or three, pick two unrelated objects and visualize a creative way to combine them into one imaginary thing. For example, a cactus and a bicycle could become a vehicle with spikes and succulents. Let your imagination run wild." Okay. "Let me know if you'd like me to suggest anything else." No. That's fine. What I'm going to do is I'm going to pick just the first one. Let's just go for that. And I'm going to do a really bad drawing using my iPad and procreate. So let's see what I can come up with in just a few minutes using this surreal landscape where objects are floating in the sky. Here we go. Okay. So I finished. It's not a great drawing. You'll be able to see it on screen just now. What I did was I started off by thinking conceptually about this. When we're talking about the surreal landscape where objects are floating in the sky, could have clouds, trees, houses. So I thought, well, what about people living on clouds? And that was what I went to. Have a whole world of people who are just floating on clouds. There's animals and wildlife living on clouds. So it was about conceptually trying to think of something and then bring that to life. So you don't go in first of all, by just drawing, you have to think what you're going to draw first, is about visualizing that. And then you put it down into something like this, which is a very sort of quick drawing that isn't great, but it gets the idea across of this other world where it exists in the fluffy kingdom above our heads. Okay. I'll be the first to admit that my drawing isn't going to win any awards, but with practice, I'd maybe get good enough to deserve a place in your fridge alongside your kid's scribbles. But remember, it's not just about the quality of drawing, it's about developing your ability to imagine and elaborate on the images in your mind. Here's the final image I want to leave you with, you writing an amazing review of this course and telling all your colleagues to take it. Make that image really vivid in your mind and then go and make it a reality. Lovely.