Top 16 'Vine-and-Velvet' Art Nouveau Illustration Styles to try for Adding Ornate Elegance to Your Projects on Weekends - Goh Ling Yong
There's a special kind of magic that swirls within the lines of Art Nouveau. It's the curve of a vine reaching for sunlight, the rich texture of a velvet gown, the glint of gold in a woman's flowing hair. It’s an art style that doesn’t just depict nature; it breathes with its rhythm. Born at the turn of the 20th century, Art Nouveau was a rebellion against rigid, academic art, choosing instead to celebrate the organic, the ornate, and the beautifully handcrafted.
This 'new art' swept across Europe, leaving a legacy of whiplash curves, botanical motifs, and an air of opulent elegance. For artists and creators today, it’s a treasure trove of inspiration. It’s a style that feels both timeless and deeply personal, perfect for adding a touch of sophisticated flair to your own projects. Whether you're a seasoned illustrator or a weekend hobbyist with a sketchbook and a fresh cup of tea, the world of Art Nouveau is waiting for you.
We've lovingly dubbed this aesthetic 'Vine-and-Velvet'—a nod to its dual nature of wild, organic growth and deep, luxurious texture. To help you dive into this enchanting world, we’ve curated a list of 16 distinct Art Nouveau illustration styles. Think of this as your weekend guide to transforming simple lines into masterpieces of ornate elegance. Let’s get started!
1. The Mucha-esque Divine Feminine
When you picture Art Nouveau, you’re likely picturing the work of Alphonse Mucha. His style is the epitome of the movement's Parisian flair, celebrated for its depiction of beautiful, ethereal women with impossibly long, flowing hair. These figures aren't just portraits; they are allegories, often framed by intricate halos, floral wreaths, and decorative borders that elevate them to goddess-like status.
The Mucha style is all about harmony and idealised beauty. The linework is delicate yet confident, and the color palettes are often soft and romantic, featuring pastel pinks, lavenders, and creamy yellows. The composition is key; subjects are typically centered and surrounded by a symphony of symbolic elements, from the seasons they represent to the products they advertise (Mucha was a prolific poster artist, after all!).
Try This: Start with a portrait sketch. Focus on the hair, letting it become a character in itself, swirling and looping around the subject. Frame your illustration with a circular or arched border and fill it with stylized flowers like lilies or poppies. Use a muted color palette to capture that vintage, dreamy quality.
2. Beardsley's Bold Black & White
Take a step into the decadent, dramatic, and slightly darker side of Art Nouveau with Aubrey Beardsley. This English illustrator mastered the art of contrast, using vast areas of solid black against crisp white space to create images that are both elegant and unsettling. His work is characterized by its precise, sharp linework, intricate patterns, and often grotesque or erotic themes.
Beardsley’s style is a masterclass in visual tension. He used minimalism to create maximum impact, proving that you don’t need a full spectrum of color to convey luxury and mood. His illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé are iconic examples, blending Japanese woodblock influences with a uniquely European sense of sophisticated decay.
Try This: Limit your palette to just black and white. Use a fine-tipped ink pen (like a Micron or a dip pen) to create your lines. Experiment with filling large sections of your drawing with solid black ink. Focus on detailed patterns in clothing or backgrounds to contrast with the stark, open spaces.
3. Klimt's Gilded Mosaics
Venture into the Vienna Secession movement with the opulent style of Gustav Klimt. His work is instantly recognizable for its lavish use of gold leaf, creating a sense of Byzantine-era richness and sacred beauty. Klimt flattened his subjects into decorative patterns, blending figures seamlessly into their ornate, mosaic-like backgrounds.
This style is a celebration of texture and surface. While the faces and hands of his subjects are often rendered with soft realism, their bodies and surroundings dissolve into a dazzling tapestry of spirals, squares, and dots. It’s the ultimate expression of the ‘Vine-and-Velvet’ theme, combining organic human forms with the rich, metallic shimmer of a treasure chest.
Try This: You don’t need real gold leaf to start! Use metallic gold gouache, ink, or gel pens. After drawing your subject, fill their clothing and the background with a dense collage of different patterns. Use circles, triangles, checkerboards, and stylized eye motifs. The key is to let the pattern dominate the composition.
4. The Glasgow School's Geometric Grace
Not all Art Nouveau is about swirling, unrestrained curves. Head north to Scotland to discover the Glasgow Style, championed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. This variation is more controlled, favoring elongated vertical lines, subtle curves, and a sense of geometric order. It’s elegant, restrained, and spiritually infused.
The Glasgow Style often features highly stylized figures and its signature "Glasgow Rose," a simplified, almost abstract version of the flower. The color palette is typically more subdued, with lilacs, greens, and silvery greys creating a tranquil, ethereal mood. It’s a more modern-feeling take on Art Nouveau, emphasizing structure and symbolism over pure ornamentation.
Try This: Focus on vertical compositions. Elongate your figures and integrate them with tall, straight lines. Practice drawing the Glasgow Rose by simplifying a real rose into a series of overlapping squares and circles. This is a style I, Goh Ling Yong, personally love for its blend of architectural precision and delicate beauty.
5. Hector Guimard's Botanical Metalwork
Draw inspiration from architecture and bring the feel of wrought iron to your illustrations. French architect Hector Guimard is famous for his Paris Métro entrances, which look like strange, beautiful plants sprouting from the city streets. This style is about capturing the sense of flowing, asymmetrical forms as if they were cast in metal or carved from wood.
Think of your lines as vines, tendrils, and insect wings forged into a solid structure. The shapes are organic and biomorphic, often resembling plant stems, seed pods, or even fossilized skeletons. It’s a great way to practice creating designs that feel both strong and delicate, fluid and permanent.
Try This: Sketch a simple object, like a lamp, a picture frame, or a letter of the alphabet. Now, redraw it using the language of Guimard’s metalwork. Replace straight lines with gentle curves and add tendril-like flourishes that seem to grow naturally from the main structure.
6. Jugendstil Typographic Flourishes
In Germany, Art Nouveau was known as Jugendstil ("Youth Style"), and it had a profound impact on typography and graphic design. This style focuses on integrating lettering and illustration so completely that they become one unified piece of art. The letters themselves are often decorated, stretched, and curved to match the accompanying illustrations.
This is less about adding text to a drawing and more about drawing the text itself. The typography is often bold and distinctive, with unique ligatures and flourishes that make it an essential part of the composition. Look at the covers of the magazine Jugend, from which the movement got its name, for incredible examples.
Try This: Choose a short word or quote. Sketch out the letters, but instead of writing them normally, treat each one like a character. Let the ascender on a 'd' grow into a flower stem or the tail of a 'y' swirl into a decorative pattern.
7. The Whiplash Line in Motion
The "whiplash" line is the single most important element of Art Nouveau. It's a dynamic, forceful, and elegant S-shaped curve that snaps back on itself like the crack of a whip. This line gives the art form its sense of movement, life, and energy. Mastering it is key to capturing the authentic feel of the style.
This isn't a specific style per se, but rather a foundational technique. The whiplash can form the contour of a dress, the tendril of a plant, a lock of hair, or a purely abstract decorative element. It's about drawing with confidence and rhythm, creating lines that feel alive.
Try This: Fill a whole page with practice whiplash curves. Use your whole arm, not just your wrist, to create long, flowing strokes. Try varying the line weight, making it thicker in the middle of a curve and thinner at the ends. Once you're comfortable, try building a simple drawing of a flower or a dragonfly using only whiplash lines.
8. Stained Glass Window Effect
Inspired by the luminous glasswork of artists like Louis Comfort Tiffany, this style translates the look of stained glass onto paper or canvas. The core technique involves using thick, bold black outlines to contain areas of pure, vibrant color. This creates a striking, jewel-like effect that feels both graphic and painterly.
The black lines act like the lead "cames" in a real window, providing structure and making the colors pop. The subject matter is often nature-based—wisteria blossoms, dragonflies, and landscapes are popular choices. The beauty of this style lies in the interplay between the dark, heavy outlines and the bright, translucent colors they enclose.
Try This: Draw your design first in pencil. Then, go over your lines with a thick black marker or brush pen. Make sure all your shapes are fully enclosed. Finally, fill in the sections with watercolor, alcohol markers, or even colored pencils, using bright, saturated hues.
9. Symbolist & Mystical Creatures
Art Nouveau was closely linked to the Symbolist movement, which favored dreams, spirituality, and mythology over realism. Artists like the Belgian Jean Delville or the Dutch Jan Toorop created illustrations filled with mystical figures, elongated angels, and strange, whimsical creatures.
This style is less about decorative patterns and more about conveying a mysterious or philosophical mood. Figures are often unnaturally long and slender, with an otherworldly grace. The compositions can be dense and dreamlike, filled with symbolic elements that hint at a deeper meaning. It's Art Nouveau for the soul.
Try This: Don't worry about realistic proportions. Sketch a human figure but stretch its limbs and neck. Give it wings or entwine it with serpents or lilies. Use a limited, moody color palette with blues, purples, and golds to enhance the mystical atmosphere.
10. Intricate Floral & Insect Borders
A hallmark of Art Nouveau design is the decorative border. Rather than a simple frame, the border becomes an integral part of the artwork, teeming with life. This style focuses on the creation of these highly detailed frames using natural motifs like flowers, leaves, insects, and birds.
Think of flowers like irises, orchids, and poppies, and insects like dragonflies, moths, and beetles. These elements are not just repeated; they are woven together in an asymmetrical, organic composition that seems to be growing around the central image. This is a fantastic way to practice your detailed linework and observation of nature.
Try This: Take a simple drawing or even a photograph you like. On a new sheet of paper, draw a frame around the dimensions of your central image and fill it with an intricate tangle of vines, flowers, and insects. Let the elements overlap and interact with each other.
11. Art Nouveau Poster & Ad Design
Art Nouveau was born in the age of the poster. Artists like Mucha and Théophile Steinlen created advertisements that were so beautiful, they were collected as art. This style is about the practical application of Art Nouveau principles to graphic design, combining an image, a product name, and text into a single, elegant composition.
The key is integration. The text isn't just slapped on top; it's woven into the design. The colors are chosen to grab attention, and the central image is usually a compelling, idealized figure (often a woman) interacting with the product. It’s a perfect weekend project to design a poster for your favorite coffee shop or a fictional concert.
Try This: Pick a product (real or imaginary). Sketch a central figure and find a way to incorporate the product naturally. Then, work on the lettering, drawing the brand name in a stylized, Art Nouveau-inspired font that complements the illustration.
12. The Japanese Woodblock Influence (Japonisme)
The arrival of Japanese art, particularly ukiyo-e woodblock prints, in Europe in the late 19th century had a seismic impact on Western artists. Art Nouveau owes a huge debt to this influence, known as Japonisme. This style adopts key principles from Japanese art: asymmetrical compositions, flattened perspective, strong outlines, and cropped figures.
This is about seeing the world through a different compositional lens. Instead of a perfectly centered subject, you might place your main focus off to one side. You might use flat planes of color instead of detailed shading, and you might crop the image in a way that feels dynamic and modern.
Try This: Find a favorite Japanese woodblock print by an artist like Hokusai or Hiroshige. Create your own illustration, but try to use its compositional structure. For example, use a large, dark shape (like a tree branch) in the foreground to frame a more distant scene.
13. Émile Gallé's Glass-Inspired Organics
Another master of the decorative arts, Émile Gallé, created breathtaking glass and furniture inspired by his passion for botany. An illustrative style based on his work would focus on translucency, subtle color gradients, and unusual natural forms. Gallé was fascinated by everything from orchids and fungi to dragonflies and seaweed.
This approach is perfect for watercolor or digital painting. It’s about creating forms that feel delicate and luminous, as if lit from within. You can play with layering colors to create a sense of depth and transparency, mimicking the techniques of glassmaking. The shapes are deeply organic, often asymmetrical and imperfect, just as they are in nature.
Try This: Use watercolors on wet paper (wet-on-wet technique) to create soft, blended backgrounds. Once dry, paint more detailed botanical subjects—like mushrooms, ferns, or seed pods—on top. Use thin, delicate ink lines to add definition after the paint has dried.
14. The Catalan Modernisme Twist
Travel to Barcelona and you’ll find Art Nouveau in its most fantastical form: Catalan Modernisme, with Antoni Gaudí as its king. This style is wilder, more textured, and more deeply inspired by the raw forms of nature—think bones, caves, and waves. It’s famous for its use of trencadís, or broken tile mosaics.
To bring this into your illustration, think less about smooth lines and more about fragmented texture. Your work can feel more sculptural and surreal. It’s a style that embraces irregularity and explosive color. It’s passionate, a little bit chaotic, and utterly unique.
Try This: Create a simple line drawing of an animal, like a lizard or a bird. Instead of filling it with solid color, fill it with a mosaic pattern. Draw small, irregular shapes inside the outline and color each one differently, mimicking the look of broken tiles.
15. Watercolor & Ink Wash Florals
For a softer, more painterly take on the 'Vine-and-Velvet' aesthetic, combine the elegance of Art Nouveau linework with the gentle flow of watercolor. This style uses a delicate ink drawing as the skeleton of the piece, which is then brought to life with soft washes of color.
This technique allows for a beautiful balance between crisp detail and atmospheric softness. The ink defines the iconic whiplash curves and botanical shapes, while the watercolor adds mood, light, and a dreamy quality. It's a very forgiving and enjoyable process, perfect for a relaxing weekend afternoon. Here at the Goh Ling Yong blog, this is one of our favorite ways to unwind and create something beautiful.
Try This: Lightly sketch a floral design in pencil. Go over the main lines with a waterproof ink pen. Once the ink is completely dry, apply light washes of watercolor. Let the colors bleed into each other slightly for a natural, organic effect.
16. Digital Art Nouveau Revival
All of these historical styles can be wonderfully reinterpreted with modern digital tools. Using an iPad with Procreate or a tablet with Adobe Illustrator, you can explore Art Nouveau with the added benefits of layers, custom brushes, and an undo button! This style is about leveraging technology to capture a vintage feel.
You can create your own pattern brushes for Klimt-inspired backgrounds, use vector tools to perfect your whiplash curves, or apply texture overlays to give your work an aged, paper-like quality. The digital medium offers endless possibilities to experiment with color palettes, composition, and effects, making it easier than ever to create complex, multi-layered Art Nouveau illustrations.
Try This: In Procreate or a similar app, create a new brush. For the brush shape, use a simple spiral or a stylized leaf. Now you have a custom pattern brush! Use it to fill in the background of a portrait. Experiment with layer modes like "Multiply" or "Overlay" to integrate your patterns with your colors.
Ready to Create Your Own Elegance?
Art Nouveau is more than just a historical style; it's a philosophy. It’s a call to find beauty in the organic, to celebrate craftsmanship, and to fill our world with flowing, elegant lines. From the divine women of Mucha to the geometric roses of Mackintosh, there is a whole universe of 'Vine-and-Velvet' inspiration waiting for your personal touch.
Don't be intimidated by the ornate details. Pick one style from this list that speaks to you, put on some music, and spend your weekend creating something just for the joy of it. The goal isn't perfection; it's to connect with a timelessly beautiful art form and add a little more elegance to your world.
Which style are you most excited to try this weekend? Let us know in the comments below! We’d love to see what you create.
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
Stay updated with the latest posts and insights by following on your favorite platform!