How I create intuitively and make portraits out of marks on a page

I touched on how I create intuitively a bit ago, but I thought I’d actually take photos of my art journal pages before I turned them into portrait paintings. This is what the page looked like before I created the portrait below.

I start out by prepping my art journal pages ahead of time. I explained how I do it in the link above. Later when I’m ready to create in my journal, I’ll look for little hints on the page that will be the start of a portrait. I don’t know about you, but I definitely see eyes, an outline of a face, and a mouth on this page, so I turned the above background into this portrait…

I actually saw a couple different faces in this background, but decided to go with only one.

When the background is mostly black, it makes it a little difficult, but I saw those jagged edges on the bottom left as hair.

From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.

Henri Matisse

I saw an eye on this page, and a bit of what looked like a nose. So, I went with it, and this is what I created…

This is a fun way to fill my art journal, and force myself to be more creative by making something out of nothing. It gets my imagination fired up, and once I start, it’s hard to stop. It’s quite addictive.

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