12 abstract art ideas you can make digitally

The best abstract art ideas for digital work start from one constraint: two colours meeting, one repeated shape, one texture, one letter. Below are twelve you can make today with nothing more than a design app or a browser, grouped into gradients, shapes, texture and type. Each one ends as a finished piece you could print, set as a wallpaper or use behind a post.

Gradient art ideas

A gradient is already a composition: it has a direction, a light source and a mood. The trick is to choose colours that mean something together and to let one area dominate. Gradient art covers the craft in depth; these four are quick starting points.

• The horizon. Two bands of colour meeting softly a third of the way down, like sea and sky at dusk. Shift the meeting line off centre.
• The single field. One colour that slowly darkens towards the edges, large enough to fill a wall. Quiet, and harder than it looks.
• The orb. A soft circle of light colour floating on a dark ground, off centre, with a wide falloff.
• The corona. A hot core ringed by cool blue, fading into night, like a star seen through a long lens.

These ideas descend directly from the mid twentieth century painters who made huge canvases of nearly pure colour. Colour field painting explains what they were doing and why it still works on screens.

Abstract shape ideas

• Cut paper. Five or six flat, hand cut looking shapes in three colours, scattered with plenty of space, in the spirit of Matisse's late cut outs.
• Stacked blocks. Rectangles of slightly different widths piled into a leaning tower, each a step darker than the one below.
• One continuous line. A single loose line that never lifts, looping across the canvas, in one colour on a flat ground.
• Repeating arches. Rows of the same arch shape, alternating two colours, slightly offset each row.

Keep shapes few and large, and let empty space be part of the picture. Flat colour with no gradients or shadows is what gives cut paper its honesty, so resist adding effects. Organic shapes shows how to draw blobs and curves that look intentional; geometric design covers the strict, ruled alternative.

Abstract texture ideas

• Heavy grain. Take any gradient above and add strong noise until it looks like a film photograph of a colour.
• Fake risograph. Two flat colours, slightly misaligned, with a speckled texture, like a cheap print run that went beautifully wrong.
• Ripples. Repeating rings in two close tones, as if a stone dropped into dyed water.

Texture is what makes digital art stop looking like a screen default. A little grain also hides banding, the visible steps that smooth gradients can show when they are compressed. Grainy gradients has the technique and the code.

Type as abstract art

Letters stop being words when you crop them hard enough. Set one letter huge, in a heavy face, and crop it so only a curve and a corner remain. It becomes a shape with a ghost of meaning, which is a lovely quality for a print or a cover.

How to make abstract art digitally

1. 1

   Choose one idea

   Pick a single idea from the list. Write it down in five words, such as "warm orb on night sky", and check every decision against it.

2. 2

   Limit the palette

   Two or three colours, plus a dark or light ground. Restriction is what makes abstract work feel composed rather than random.

3. 3

   Set the size first

   Decide whether it is a print, a phone wallpaper or a desktop. Composition changes completely between a tall and a wide frame.

4. 4

   Make three versions

   Change one variable each time: the angle, the main colour, the position of the brightest area. Choose the best, not the first.

5. 5

   Finish with texture

   Add a light grain, export at full size as PNG, and look at it on the device or paper it is meant for.

If you'd rather start from a finished surface, Gradiently's Market is full of living gradient and material backgrounds called Marks, each one checked against every other so no two look alike. You can design with any unclaimed Mark for free, set it at any of the sizes below and add type on top; exporting a full size print takes a Mark you own and Pro.

Sizes for prints and wallpapers

A piece made for a tall phone screen rarely crops well to a wide desktop, so recompose rather than crop. Desktop wallpaper has more ideas for wide formats, and abstract background shows how the same pieces work behind words.