Knife Stroke Portrait

Illustration · Palette Knife · Portrait

Recipe

The style is the recipe. The subject is yours.

The examples above were generated with Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.5. The recipes below are written for GPT Image and Flux, so treat the settings as a starting point rather than the exact run.

A description in plain sentences. This is the version to start with, and it works on any current image model. Settings below are the ones we used on GPT Image; treat them as a starting point.

Make it yours

This recipe describes a treatment rather than a thing. Put your own subject in and it is added to the end of the prompt.

Prompt

A portrait made entirely from broad palette knife strokes of unmixed colour, where the face is only just legible because a handful of marks land in the right places. Blue, yellow and red sitting side by side without blending, wide flat strokes with hard edges where the knife lifted off, large areas left as raw abstract paint. Thick visible paint, no fine detail anywhere, no drawn line. Subject: a man in a dark coat facing forward.

The prompt gets you close. Feed one of the examples in as a style reference for the rest. Download the images

Use the examples as a reference

Download the examples

Send the example as an input image to the images.edits endpoint alongside the prompt, or attach it in ChatGPT. It follows composition closely, so describe your subject firmly or it will copy the example.