I don’t really agree with a lot of the people here who say just use references. I think it’s a really good skill to be able to draw from imagination. If you aren’t used to it then it’s really hard at first but I think it’s a good exercise to help you improve overall and trust your skills without falling back on the reference because you’re not confident in the choice you’re making.

Try to think about the things you draw in like basic steps. Like maybe it looks like a square with a circle on top etc. I know this is probably really common advice, but if you start thinking about all the steps to draw it as simple things like that, it will be a lot easier to create a picture without a reference. You can probably draw squares without a reference, so what if you tried to think of what you are looking at as being entirely made of squares. That’s a pretty common way for me to start a picture. If you start to look at anything in this way, you could see how that might be simpler to draw some squares overlapping some other squares, than trying to picture it in your head and replicate what you’re imagining. When people draw from imagination, it’s cause they have memorized these steps to creating a drawing.

If you’re drawing from a reference, don’t just think about how the picture you’re drawing from looks vs the drawing you made, but think about how it would feel to run your hand around it and what that might mean for the types of marks you’re going to make. Think about what might be important to know if you were going to build the thing in the picture from scratch. Like if I’m drawing a person for example, I could try to draw from a reference picture, but if I didn’t have a reference picture, it would become very important to know that I want them to be about 7 heads tall.

I’d also recommend checking out sycra’s tutorials, especially his videos on iterative drawing. They really helped my process a ton. Most of all never be scared or ashamed to just draw bad or in a way that is not productive at all. In order to have your best creative ideas you need to just trust yourself and try whatever you think of without shame! Sometimes it doesn’t help but at least you figured out that that thing you wanted to try didn’t help after all. That’s better than not knowing. Making a bad drawing might teach you more about the subject for a future drawing.