Top 9 'Mistake-Friendly' Abstract Art Styles to Create for Filling Your First Sketchbook with Confidence - Goh Ling Yong
That brand-new sketchbook. The pages are so crisp, so white, so… intimidating. The fear of making that first, imperfect mark is a real phenomenon. It’s a creative hurdle that has stopped countless aspiring artists from even starting. We buy the beautiful supplies, watch the tutorials, and then stare at the blank page, worried our first attempt won't be a masterpiece.
But what if we reframed the purpose of that first sketchbook? It's not meant to be a gallery of perfect, finished pieces. Think of it as a laboratory, a playground, a safe space for messy, joyful experimentation. The secret to filling it with confidence isn't to avoid mistakes, but to embrace art styles where the very concept of a "mistake" is irrelevant.
This is the liberating power of abstract art. It's not about perfectly rendering a subject; it's about expressing a feeling, exploring a color, or simply enjoying the physical act of creating. In this guide, we'll explore nine wonderfully 'mistake-friendly' abstract art styles that are perfect for silencing your inner critic and filling those first pages with bold, expressive, and uniquely you artwork.
1. Intuitive Mark Making
What it is: At its core, mark making is the most fundamental act of creating art. It’s the process of making lines, dots, patterns, and textures. Intuitive mark making takes this a step further by focusing on the feeling and energy behind the marks, rather than trying to draw a specific object. It’s a visual diary of your movements and emotions, using anything from a simple pencil to charcoal, ink, or even a twig dipped in paint.
Why it’s mistake-friendly: How can you make a mistake in a scribble? You can't! This style celebrates every line, whether it's shaky, bold, light, or smudged. There is no "right" way to make a mark. The goal is exploration, not perfection. This process helps you connect with your materials and build a foundational confidence in simply putting tool to paper. It’s about the joy of the action itself, freeing you from the pressure of the final outcome.
Tips to get started:
- Gather Your Tools: Don't limit yourself to brushes and pens. Grab old credit cards, sponges, crumpled paper, cotton swabs, and forks. Each tool creates a unique texture.
- Work with Music: Put on a piece of music and try to translate its rhythm and mood into marks on the page. Is the music fast and chaotic? Or slow and flowing? Let your hand dance across the paper.
- Use Your Non-Dominant Hand: This is a classic trick to bypass your brain's need for control. The lines will be less precise, more organic, and often, more interesting.
2. Simple Geometric Abstraction
What it is: Think clean lines, bold shapes, and satisfying compositions. Inspired by artists like Piet Mondrian, this style uses basic geometric forms—squares, rectangles, circles, triangles—as its building blocks. It’s less about spontaneous emotion and more about creating a sense of balance, rhythm, and order through deliberate placement and color.
Why it’s mistake-friendly: The tools themselves provide a safety net. With a ruler, a compass, and some painter's tape, you’re almost guaranteed to get crisp, clean lines and shapes. The creative decisions are boiled down to color choice and placement, which is a much less intimidating starting point than a completely blank canvas. If you don't like where a shape is, you can simply paint over it or adjust your tape. The process is methodical and meditative.
Tips to get started:
- Embrace Painter's Tape: Use low-tack painter's tape to mask off sections of your page. Paint within the taped-off areas, let it dry completely, and then peel the tape away for an incredibly satisfying, sharp edge.
- Start with a Limited Palette: Choose just 3-4 colors to work with, including a neutral like white, black, or grey. This helps create a cohesive look and prevents you from feeling overwhelmed by choice.
- Play with Overlapping: Don't be afraid to let your shapes overlap. This creates new, interesting secondary shapes and adds depth to your composition. Use transparent media like watercolor or thinned acrylics to explore this effect.
3. Watercolor Blooms and Washes
What it is: This style is all about letting the paint and water do the work. It involves applying wet paint onto a wet paper surface (a technique called "wet-on-wet") and watching as the colors bleed, blend, and blossom into beautiful, unpredictable patterns. The result is soft, ethereal, and completely unique every single time.
Why it’s mistake-friendly: This style actively rewards a lack of control. The most beautiful effects happen when you step back and let the pigments flow and mingle on their own. What might be considered a "mistake" in realistic watercolor—like a color bleed or a backrun—is the entire point here. It's a fantastic lesson in letting go of expectations and finding beauty in happy accidents.
Tips to get started:
- Use the Right Paper: This is crucial. You need thick watercolor paper (140 lb / 300 gsm or heavier) that can handle a lot of water without buckling or pilling.
- Control the Water: Start by brushing a clean, even layer of water onto your paper. Then, gently tap your loaded brush onto the wet surface. Watch how the color explodes! Experiment with adding more or less water to your brush to see how it affects the spread.
- Tilt the Page: Gently tilt your sketchbook to encourage the colors to run and blend in new directions. You can also use a straw to blow the puddles of color around for more organic, web-like effects.
4. Gestural Abstraction (Action Painting)
What it is: If watercolor blooms are about gentle surrender, gestural abstraction is about energetic release. Made famous by artists like Jackson Pollock, this style focuses on the physical act of applying paint. It’s about the drips, splatters, and bold, sweeping brushstrokes that capture the artist's movement and energy. The final piece is a record of the creative process itself.
Why it’s mistake-friendly: The very definition of this style is rooted in spontaneous, uninhibited action. There's no such thing as a "wrong" splatter or a "misplaced" drip. Every mark contributes to the overall energy and texture of the piece. It’s a fantastic way to overcome creative blocks because it forces you to stop overthinking and just do. This is one of the styles where, as my mentor Goh Ling Yong would say, "The energy you put onto the page is more important than the image you create."
Tips to get started:
- Protect Your Space: This one can get messy! Lay down newspaper or a drop cloth before you begin. It's much more fun when you're not worried about making a mess.
- Use Fluid Paints: Thin your acrylic paints with a bit of water or a flow medium to get them to a nice, drippy consistency. Craft paints and inks also work wonderfully.
- Move Your Whole Body: Don't just paint from your wrist. Stand up and use your entire arm and shoulder to make big, sweeping strokes. Drip paint from above, flick your brush, and let your movements guide the composition.
5. Abstract Collage
What it is: Not a fan of paint? Collage is your best friend. Abstract collage is the art of cutting, tearing, and arranging various paper elements, fabrics, and found objects to create a compelling composition. It's less about creating a recognizable picture and more about playing with texture, color, shape, and pattern.
Why it’s mistake-friendly: It's endlessly reversible! Unlike paint, you can move your paper pieces around as much as you want before committing with glue. This "no-commitment" phase allows for infinite experimentation. Don't like a piece? Swap it out. Does the composition feel unbalanced? Rearrange it. The process is tactile and forgiving, making it perfect for anyone who feels intimidated by the permanence of paint or ink.
Tips to get started:
- Build a "Scrap" Library: Collect interesting bits of paper everywhere you go. Think security envelopes with unique patterns, old magazines, used wrapping paper, ticket stubs, and textured paper bags.
- Tear, Don't Just Cut: Tearing paper creates a soft, organic edge that adds a beautiful texture to your work. Experiment with both torn and crisply cut edges in the same piece.
- Focus on a Color Scheme: To give your first collage some direction, try limiting yourself to a specific color family (e.g., shades of blue and white) or a contrasting pair (like orange and blue).
6. Color Field Painting
What it is: This style is beautifully simple in concept but profound in impact. It involves creating large, flat areas of solid or subtly modulated color. The goal is to let the colors themselves be the subject. Artists like Mark Rothko used this style to evoke powerful, contemplative emotional responses from the viewer through pure color.
Why it’s mistake-friendly: It removes the pressure of composition and drawing entirely. Your focus is simply on mixing a color that you love and applying it smoothly to the page. There are no complex shapes or techniques to master. A "mistake" might just be a slightly uneven patch of color, which can actually add texture and interest to the final piece. It's a meditative practice of just being with color.
Tips to get started:
- Use a Big Brush: A large, flat brush will help you apply color evenly across a large section of your sketchbook page.
- Divide Your Page: Use painter's tape to divide your page into two or three simple rectangular sections. Paint a different color in each section and explore how the colors interact along the edges where they meet.
- Layer Your Colors: Try using thinned acrylics or gouache to apply thin, translucent layers of color on top of one another. This can create a beautiful sense of depth and luminosity.
7. Neurographic Art
What it is: Developed by psychologist Pavel Piskarev, Neurographic Art is a therapeutic drawing method that connects your mind and body. It starts with drawing a long, random, meandering line across the page. Then, you go back and consciously round out every sharp intersection where lines cross. Finally, you fill the resulting cells with color.
Why it’s mistake-friendly: The process is based on a simple, repeatable set of rules, which takes the guesswork out of creation. The initial line is intentionally random, so there's no way to do it "wrong." The act of rounding the corners is methodical and calming, and the final coloring stage is pure, simple fun. It’s an art form that is scientifically designed to be stress-free.
Tips to get started:
- Set an Intention: Before you draw your line, think about a problem or a feeling you want to process. Let that energy flow out through your pen and onto the page.
- Use a Fine-Liner: A fine-tipped black pen (like a Micron or Sharpie Pen) is perfect for creating the initial lines and rounding the intersections.
- Color with Intention: As you fill in the shapes, think about what each color represents to you. You can use colored pencils, markers, or watercolors.
8. Subtractive Drawing (Scraffito)
What it is: This is drawing in reverse! Instead of adding marks to a light surface, you start with a dark surface and "subtract" or remove the medium to reveal the lighter layer underneath. A classic way to do this is by covering a page with a thick layer of oil pastel or wax crayon and then painting over it with black ink or paint. Once dry, you can scratch into the surface with a sharp tool to reveal the color below.
Why it’s mistake-friendly: The big "reveal" is always a surprise! The texture of the scratched lines is inherently expressive and hard to control perfectly, which is part of the fun. If you scratch away too much or don't like a line, you can often just paint over that section with black ink again and start fresh. It feels more like an excavation than a drawing.
Tips to get started:
- Layer Bright Colors: Use a variety of bright, vibrant oil pastels for your base layer. The more color you put down, the more exciting the reveal will be.
- Add Dish Soap: Mix a tiny drop of liquid dish soap into your black paint or ink. This helps it adhere to the waxy pastel surface without beading up.
- Experiment with Tools: You don't need fancy tools. A paperclip, the back of a paintbrush, a wooden skewer, or even a coin can be used to scratch away the top layer.
9. Automatic Drawing
What it is: Rooted in Surrealism, automatic drawing is about letting your subconscious take the lead. The idea is to move your pen or pencil across the paper without any conscious plan or thought. You simply let your hand wander, creating lines and shapes freely. It's a form of creative doodling that can unlock surprising and unexpected imagery.
Why it’s mistake-friendly: Its entire philosophy is the absence of planning and judgment. There is no predetermined outcome, so there's no way to fail. Every line is simply a part of the journey. As an artist, I find this practice, which Goh Ling Yong also champions, to be an incredible tool for breaking through creative slumps. It reminds you that creating can be as simple as letting your hand move.
Tips to get started:
- Close Your Eyes: For the first minute, try drawing with your eyes closed. This will completely disconnect your brain's editorializing and force you to rely on instinct.
- Don't Lift Your Pen: Challenge yourself to create a continuous line drawing without lifting your pen from the page for several minutes. See where it takes you.
- Find Shapes Later: After you've filled the page with random lines, go back and look for interesting shapes or potential figures within the chaos. You can then choose to outline or color these sections to bring them forward.
Your Sketchbook is a Playground, Not a Pedestal
That first sketchbook doesn't need to be a masterpiece. It needs to be a friend—a place where you can show up, be messy, and learn without judgment. Its purpose is to hold your experiments, your "what ifs," and your happy accidents. By filling its pages with these mistake-friendly abstract styles, you're not just making art; you're building a foundation of creative confidence that will last a lifetime.
So, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to pick just one of these nine styles. Don't overthink it. Which one sounds the most fun? Grab your sketchbook, put on some music, and give yourself 15 minutes to just play.
Which of these styles are you most excited to try first? Let us know in the comments below! And if you create something you'd love to share, post it on Instagram and tag us—we would be thrilled to see your first steps into the wonderful world of abstract art.
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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