Here are easy ideas to help with your intuitive artistic vision.
When travelling on our artistic journey we can all fall into the trap of blocking our intuitive creative, in favour of a more controlled outcome. It’s happened to the best of us, it’s a difficult thing to be blinkered to the opinions around you and be true to your own vision.
When seeing a particular artist achieve recognition, it conditions us to thinking that that they are ‘doing it right’, and to absorb elements of what they do as part of our own creative model.
We may subconsciously decide that some part of what they do is needed for success, especially if we are not yet at a point of feeling happy with our work, often not even in our own eyes never mind anyone else’s!
This can easily lead over time to your art being a rehash of many elements of other people’s visions, and lacking that secret sauce of being purely and unequivocally your own.
This uniqueness of expression is where artistic value truly lies.
Don’t get me wrong, inspiration is a good and intrinsic part of anyone’s artistic development, but often, the results based society that we live in draws us to form a need to have acknowledgment and validation in what we produce.
In this age of social media, this drip fed programming is even more prevalent and affecting to the way we look at what we produce. Even if we don’t realise it.
Experimentation, freedom of expression, and truly connecting to your own soul’s vision can feel like a brave thing to do and put out there. When you gain the insight and clarity to find what you really want to create, regardless of its popularity in the eyes of others, it gets much easier.
Helping people to connect to their inner artist and their own intuitive ways of expression is a passion of mine.
To inspire others to embrace their own creative voice.
To create from the soul ✨
Here are a few ideas to help release your inhibitions and to embrace going with the flow while creating your masterpieces !
1. Put your pencil in your non-dominant hand and simply enjoy some mark making! Then transfer the pencil to your dominant hand and play with the marks to form shapes, patterns, or even objects. See what instinctively comes to mind when you look at them, and develop them from there.
You can imagine how this abstracted female figure was born from random marks, and has her own cosmic energy ✨
2. If a painting isn’t going to plan, change the plan! I painted a landscape recently and it was ok, but I turned it upside down and hey presto! It became a city scape of other worldly constructions- if you look at your image from a different perspective, you can often discover a completely new vision.
This was made with intuitive mark making- I saw the distant buildings and the heavy, storm laden skies...
But on turning the piece upside down, I saw an enchanting, futuristic vision of delicate buildings, viewed from beneath an overhang of pre-historic rock formations. I think I like this vision more, and I have no problem with turning it around!
3. Restrict yourself to a pallet of only three or four pre-chosen colours. Occasionally we can tied up in overthinking colour combinations, or overwork a nice fresh image into mud, by trying too hard to force an outcome. Certain materials such as acrylics would be fine to keep changing, but I’ve often had a moment of genius and ended up completely losing the flow of my piece. It might have been that I was trying to hard to head it towards what I had in my mind at the start.
By making the project a simple investigation into the relationship of pre chosen colours, you can use this either as a ground to inspire an over painting, or you may discover a unique energy forming between the colours as you play. This often makes a perfectly finalised piece of art in itself.
I personally love this simple colour combination, it has a power and elegance in its simplicity.
4. Give yourself a time limitation. This may be different for everyone, I am super quick at creating, so a time limit for me may be shorter than for others. If you like to spend hours on a piece, you may feel like a 2 hour window is a time limit, whereas I would use 30 minutes to an hour. Just set yourself a time that is significantly less than you would usually take to complete a piece, and let go! By setting the intention to create the ‘essence’ or ‘feeling’ of an idea, rather than keep working until a desired ‘result’ has been achieved, it directs you to only include marks which you feel instinctively, rather than having time and opportunity to fuss over details.
You may surprise yourself with a completely new style of working.
I wasn’t feeling inspired this particular day. I only had an hour or so to get anything done, but didn’t want to waste an opportunity to be creative at the studio.
I had no plan, so used a huge piece of corrugated packaging, so as not to be too precious about the my materials, and just enjoyed the freedom of knowing that this was unlikely to be sold due to its painting ground.
I actually loved the fruits of my hour of splashing around, and loved the texture and quality of marks that the corrugation brought to the painting.
5. Limit your tools. If I want to create something spontaneous or have a speedy creative fix, I often turn to pallet knives-they give me control, but not too much, so I still find those happy accidents of colour mixing happening on the canvas. You could decide to simply use a sponge, a piece of flat cardboard, even your fingers, to keep your art in the moment, and fresh. I’ve seen huge masterpieces created with hand prints, or funky patterns realised from carved potatoes dipped in paint. Choose a tool of expression that you are unfamiliar with, and give your mind a chance to embrace surprise!
Here are two landscapes that I did side by side with the same colour pallet and using only a pallet knife. (I did go on to add a couple of black ink lines on the cliffs).
It illustrates how, by letting go of trying to control detail, you can actually create intricate colour blends and the illusion of having laboured over detail, simply by letting a painting tool have free reign to make its own marks.
I started out with the intention of creating landscapes here, inspired by the colours of the hills where I live, but you can just as easily mark make, then ‘join the dots’ into a pleasing image, letting the marks inspire your pictorial path.
Be fearless!
Jump in and have a go at something new...
one change to how you work can create a vast new array of inspiration!
How do you enjoy creating in your life?...
About the author
Cherianne Dawn is a psychic artist and symbolist, and aims to use her gifts to teach and inspire.
Life Path Alignment & Symbolic Support with Cherianne
An insight into your present to empower your future.
She runs an online intuitive school 'Catching Visions'
guiding conscious beings to expand their spirituality
and nurture their creative flow.