Top 9 'Era-Defining' Art Styles to learn at home for a Chronological Journey Through Creativity - Goh Ling Yong
Have you ever stood in front of a blank canvas or an empty sketchbook, feeling a powerful urge to create but paralyzed by a single question: Where do I even begin? The world of art is vast, a sprawling continent of styles, techniques, and movements. It’s easy to feel lost without a map.
What if, instead of trying to learn everything at once, you took a journey? A chronological adventure through art history, not as a stuffy academic, but as an active participant. By learning the "era-defining" styles in the order they appeared, you don't just learn how to paint or draw; you learn why art evolved. Each movement was a reaction, a rebellion, or a revolution, and by recreating them, you can absorb their lessons and discover your own unique voice along the way.
This guide is your map. We'll travel from the rigid order of ancient Egypt to the chaotic freedom of Abstract Expressionism, all from the comfort of your home. Each step is designed to teach you a core artistic principle, building your skills layer by layer. So grab your supplies, and let’s begin our journey through time.
1. Ancient Egyptian Art: The Art of Order and Symbolism
Our journey starts over 3,000 years ago on the banks of the Nile. Egyptian art wasn't about realism; it was about clarity, order, and eternity. Artists followed a strict set of rules, known as a "canon of proportions," to depict the world not as it looked, but in its most complete and understandable form. This is why you see figures with their heads in profile, but their eyes and torsos facing you directly—they wanted to show every part of the body clearly.
Learning this style is a fantastic foundation for any beginner. It forces you to think about composition, clean lines, and symbolic communication. You’ll learn to simplify forms and understand how to arrange elements within a frame to tell a story. It's less about capturing fleeting light and more about creating a timeless, graphic statement. Forget shading and perspective for now; this is all about the power of the silhouette.
Try This at Home: Create a self-portrait in the Egyptian style. Grab a pencil and paper. Draw your head in profile, but draw your eye as if looking straight ahead. Attach this to a forward-facing torso, and then draw your arms and legs in profile, as if walking. Use bold outlines and fill the shapes with flat colours using markers, coloured pencils, or gouache paint. This exercise is a brilliant lesson in symbolic representation over realism.
2. Classical Greek & Roman Art: The Pursuit of the Ideal Form
Next, we leap forward to ancient Greece and Rome, where the artistic goal shifted dramatically. The focus turned to capturing the ideal human form. Artists became masters of anatomy, proportion, and balance. They studied the body obsessively, not just to replicate it, but to perfect it, creating sculptures of gods and athletes that felt both lifelike and impossibly perfect.
For the at-home artist, this era is your boot camp for observational drawing. It teaches you to see the world in terms of form, volume, and weight. How does a muscle wrap around a bone? How does fabric fold over a knee? By sketching sculptures (you can find thousands of photos online) or even just draping a sheet over a chair, you train your eye to understand three-dimensional space and translate it onto a two-dimensional surface. This is where you learn the "bones" of realism.
Try This at Home: Find a simple household object with a strong shape, like a mug, a bottle, or a piece of fruit. Using a charcoal or graphite pencil, sketch its basic outline. Now, pay close attention to where the light hits it and where the shadows fall. Instead of just colouring in the dark parts, try to use shading to describe its form. Use curved lines of shading on a round apple, and straight lines on a boxy book. This is your first step into creating the illusion of 3D.
3. The Renaissance: Mastering Depth and Realism
Welcome to the Renaissance, an explosive rebirth of art and science in Europe. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo weren’t just painters; they were scientists. They dissected bodies to understand anatomy and used mathematics to invent linear perspective—a revolutionary system for creating believable, three-dimensional depth on a flat canvas. Another key technique was chiaroscuro, the use of strong contrasts between light and dark to model forms.
This is where you bring order and science to your art. Learning one-point perspective is a game-changer; suddenly, you can draw roads that disappear into the distance and buildings that feel solid. Practicing chiaroscuro will make your subjects "pop" off the page, giving them weight and drama. The Renaissance teaches you to be an architect of your own little world, constructing it with logic and precision.
Try This at Home: Master one-point perspective. Draw a horizontal line across your page (the horizon line) and place a single dot on it (the vanishing point). Now, draw a square or rectangle somewhere on the page. From each corner of that square, draw a light, straight line that connects to the vanishing point. You've just created the illusion of a box or a building receding into space! Practice this with a few shapes to build your own simple city scene.
4. Baroque: Unleashing Drama and Emotion
If the Renaissance was about divine harmony and order, the Baroque period was its theatrical, emotional, and dramatic successor. Artists like Caravaggio and Rembrandt took the realism of the Renaissance and injected it with intense emotion, movement, and a sense of awe. Compositions became dynamic and diagonal, and the gentle light of the Renaissance was often replaced with tenebrism—an extreme form of chiaroscuro with deep, dark shadows and single, brilliant light sources.
Studying the Baroque style is an incredible lesson in mood and storytelling. You learn that how you light a subject can completely change its meaning. It’s the difference between a calmly lit portrait and a face emerging from inky blackness, filled with tension and mystery. This style teaches you to be a director, using light and shadow to guide the viewer's eye and evoke a powerful emotional response.
Try This at Home: Conduct a chiaroscuro study. Wait until evening and find a single, strong light source like a desk lamp. Place an object—an old shoe, a crumpled piece of paper, or your own hand—in the light. The goal is to capture the intense contrast. On a dark piece of paper with white charcoal, or a white piece of paper with black charcoal, focus only on the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows, letting the mid-tones disappear. You’ll be amazed at the drama you can create.
5. Impressionism: Capturing Light and a Fleeting Moment
Tired of the dark, stuffy studios of the past? So were the Impressionists! In the mid-19th century, artists like Monet and Renoir took their easels outside (en plein air) to capture the world as they saw it in that very moment. They weren't interested in painting a perfect tree; they were interested in painting the effect of sunlight on that tree. This meant short, thick brushstrokes, an emphasis on the changing qualities of light, and a vibrant, often unmixed colour palette.
This is your permission to loosen up! Impressionism teaches you to see colour and light above all else. You learn that shadows aren't just black or grey—they are filled with reflected colour from the sky and surrounding objects. It's about working quickly, trusting your instincts, and capturing a feeling rather than a photograph. As a budding artist, it’s a liberating experience that frees you from the pressure of perfect, blended lines.
Try This at Home: Find a spot near a window and set a timer for 15 minutes. Using acrylics or oil paints, try to paint the scene outside. Don't draw outlines first. Work quickly, using dabs and dashes of colour. Instead of mixing a perfect green for a tree, try dabbing in bits of yellow, blue, and even red. Focus on the overall impression of light and colour, not the details.
6. Post-Impressionism: Expressing Emotion Through Colour and Form
What came after Impressionism? A group of wildly individualistic artists who took the innovations of light and colour but added a heaping dose of personal emotion, symbolism, and structure. This isn't one single style but a collection of them. Think of Vincent van Gogh's thick, swirling brushstrokes that convey his inner turmoil, or Georges Seurat's meticulous, scientific dots of colour in Pointillism.
This is the point in our journey where you start to bend the rules to serve your own vision. Post-Impressionism is about using colour, line, and texture not just to show what something looks like, but what it feels like. This is a philosophy that creative professionals like Goh Ling Yong often champion—using technique not as an end in itself, but as a tool for powerful communication. It’s the bridge between depicting the outer world and expressing your inner world.
Try This at Home: Try Pointillism. Take a simple subject, like an apple. Instead of painting it with strokes, fill the entire shape with tiny dots of colour using markers or paint on a cotton swab. To create the red of the apple, don't just use red dots; place dots of orange, yellow, and even a little blue next to each other. From a distance, the viewer's eye will blend them together, creating a vibrant, shimmering effect.
7. Cubism: Deconstructing and Reassembling Reality
At the start of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque shattered the single-viewpoint perspective that had dominated art for 500 years. Cubism was about breaking down an object into its geometric components and showing it from multiple viewpoints at once. Imagine walking around a guitar and then painting the front, side, and back all in the same picture. It's a revolutionary way of seeing that values concept over visual reality.
For the modern artist, practicing Cubism is a fantastic mental workout. It forces you to stop copying what's in front of you and start analyzing it. You learn to see the underlying geometric shapes in everything—the cylinder of a bottle, the cone of a lampshade, the sphere of an orange. It’s an exercise in abstract thinking that can strengthen all your other artistic endeavours.
Try This at Home: Take a simple object like a coffee mug. On a single sheet of paper, draw it from different angles: a circle for the top-down view, a C-shape for the handle, and a trapezoid for the side profile. Now, try to combine these separate drawings into one single, overlapping composition. Use straight lines and geometric shapes. You can even cut them out of coloured paper and create a collage.
8. Surrealism: Exploring the World of Dreams
Have you ever had a dream that felt completely bizarre yet strangely logical? That’s the territory of Surrealism. Inspired by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, artists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte sought to unlock the power of the subconscious mind. They painted melting clocks, trains emerging from fireplaces, and men in bowler hats raining from the sky. The techniques were often highly realistic, but the subject matter was straight from the id.
This style is a wonderful way to unleash your imagination and break free from the constraints of logic. Surrealism gives you permission to be weird, to juxtapose unrelated objects, and to tell stories that don't have to make sense in the real world. Techniques like "automatism" (doodling without conscious thought) or "frottage" (making rubbings of textured surfaces) are excellent ways to generate unexpected ideas.
Try This at Home: Create an "exquisite corpse" drawing. This is a classic surrealist game. Fold a piece of paper into three sections. In the top section, draw a head (it can be human, animal, or machine—anything!). Fold it over so the next person can't see it, leaving only tiny marks to show where the neck is. Pass it to a friend (or just do it yourself after a break) to draw the torso, then fold it again for someone to draw the legs. Unfold it to reveal your bizarre, collaborative, and truly surreal creature.
9. Abstract Expressionism: The Art of Action and Pure Emotion
Our final stop is mid-20th century America, with the raw, energetic, and often monumental style of Abstract Expressionism. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning turned the creative process itself into the subject. For them, the canvas was an "arena in which to act." They dripped, splattered, smeared, and scraped paint with enormous energy, creating works that were not pictures of an experience, but a record of the experience of creating them.
This is the ultimate lesson in letting go. It’s not about control or precision; it's about gesture, emotion, and intuition. For anyone who has ever felt "I can't even draw a straight line," this style is for you. It teaches you that art can be about the physical joy of moving paint around, of responding to colour and texture in the moment. It is messy, freeing, and profoundly personal.
Try This at Home: Get ready for some action painting! If you have the space, put a large sheet of paper or an old bedsheet on the floor outside or in a garage. Use house paint or watered-down acrylics. Instead of a brush, use sticks, turkey basters, or just drip the paint straight from the can. Move around the canvas, letting your body's movements dictate where the paint goes. Don't try to make a picture of anything. Focus on the rhythm, the colours, and the energy of the process.
Your Journey Is Just Beginning
You've just travelled through thousands of years of human creativity, from the strict lines of Egypt to the liberated splatters of New York. This chronological journey isn't about perfectly mastering nine different styles. It’s about collecting tools, ideas, and perspectives at each stop. You've learned about line, form, perspective, light, colour, emotion, and pure action.
The most important lesson, a principle I know Goh Ling Yong values deeply, is that understanding the context—the why behind each brushstroke—enriches your own creative process immeasurably. Now you have a foundation. You can mix and match, taking the dramatic lighting of the Baroque and applying it to a Cubist composition, or using the emotional colour of the Post-Impressionists in an abstract piece.
The blank page is no longer an intimidating void. It's a destination for your next great adventure. So, which era are you going to visit first? Pick one that excites you, try the exercise, and see where the journey takes you.
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About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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