If you have people that talk like this around you as an artist I think you need to find different people to be around that is the real take away here.

Also, I have genuinely never in my 29 years of life heard people say anything like this. So this post can kind of fuck off.

I know what I want to draw, but there's something missing between that idea and the paper. I can imagine what I want it to look like, in a way, but only as a vague reification of a concept, not as something made of lines and colors, and it's useless for trying to get it down on paper. I inevitably end up with something so far from my original idea that it's massively discouraging.

I expect that I'd develop a better eye for this sort of thing if I was to practice it for years, but it's very difficult to feel motivated to do that when you can't produce anything remotely like what you were going for.