The purpose of this study is to investigate whether copying works of art facilitates creative drawing. Thirty undergraduates, not majoring in art, individually participated in a three-day experiment. Each one was assigned to one of three experimental groups: the Copy and Create (CC) group, the Copy and Reproduce (CR) group, or the control (No copy but Create, NC) group. The participants who copied an artist's drawings (CC group) produced more creative drawings in the post-test than those who did not (NC group). Furthermore, the designs of the drawings by the CC group were different from those by the CR group. Analyses of questionnaires and verbal protocols indicate that copying an unfamiliar style of art (in this case, the abstract style) facilitated a change in the participants' mental representation of artistic creation through the following two cognitive processes: First, it relaxed the constraint of their existing idea about drawing, i.e., ‘a realistic drawing style is important’, and second it helped them to construct a new idea about drawing, i.e., ‘Subjective impression or evaluation is essential’, so that they were able to have a new perspective in drawing their original pictures. They consciously tried to express such impressions or evaluations in the post-test drawing, and the result was that they produced more creative works. Although it has been claimed that copying often plays a negative role in creation, our findings suggest that active interaction with the ideas of others through copying their works of art has great potential to facilitate student's artistic creation.