Mental imagery is a vital cognitive skill that significantly influences how reality is perceived while creating art. Its multifaceted nature reveals various dimensions of creative expression, amplifying the inherent complexities of measuring it. This study aimed to shorten the Mental Imagery Scale in Artistic Creativity (MISAC) via the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm (ACO), a metaheuristic methodology for developing psychometrically robust brief scales. Answering 63 items in the original version of MISAC demands a higher cognitive load and, consequently, more time. Therefore, our goal was to shorten it while preserving its psychometric properties. In this study, responses to the MISAC were obtained from 500 undergraduate students enrolled in an art education program. The items on the short form of the MISAC were selected based on pre-specified validity criteria and content representability. The 28-item short form of MISAC demonstrated comparable performance to the original version regarding construct validity, criteria-related validity, and reliability coefficients. Moreover, strict invariance was attained across both gender groups in the validation process of the short form. These results highlight the utility of the shortened version of the MISAC as a valid measure with minimal loss of information of scores compared to the full version.