How to Draw 70s Retro Aesthetic Art

What You'll Need

• •Sketchbook or heavyweight drawing paper
• •Graphite pencil and eraser
• •Fine liner, brush pen, or marker for clean shapes
• •Colored pencils, gouache, markers, or acrylics in earthy tones
• •Digital drawing tablet or iPad with a painting app for final polish
• •Texture brushes, grain overlays, or scanned paper textures

Step by Step

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   1. Choose a simple retro subject

   Start with a subject that naturally suits the era’s cozy optimism: a living room corner, a groovy poster, a stylized flower, a sunburst, a mushroom, a vintage lamp, or a relaxed character. Keep the scene small and readable so the shapes can carry the mood. If you are making a character or environment, think more about silhouette and attitude than tiny details. The best 70s pieces often feel like they could live on a magazine cover, record sleeve, or wall print.

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   2. Block in the composition with large, flowing shapes

   Sketch your design using big curved lines instead of sharp angles and rigid geometry. Build forms with flowing S-curves, rounded corners, and soft asymmetry so the composition feels organic. Leave breathing room around the main subject, because this style often relies on open negative space and strong shape clarity. If you want a more authentic look, make the layout slightly poster-like, with a strong central motif and supporting curves around it.

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   3. Design the wavy forms and silhouettes

   Refine the main shapes so they look soft, rhythmic, and a little playful. Hair, clouds, furniture edges, decorative borders, and petals can all use wave patterns and undulating contours. Avoid making every curve identical; vary the amplitude of the waves so the image feels hand-made rather than stamped out. A good test is to squint at your sketch—if the silhouette is clear and pleasantly uneven, you are on the right track.

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   4. Build a warm earthy palette

   Select colors inspired by mustard, burnt orange, olive, rust, tan, cream, cocoa, and muted teal. Limit yourself to a small palette so the piece feels cohesive and era-specific. Use the brightest color sparingly as an accent rather than letting it dominate the image. If you want stronger 70s flavor, pair warm browns and oranges with one cooler accent like dusty blue or green to keep the palette from becoming flat.

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   5. Add flat fills and simple shading

   Fill large areas with mostly solid color, then use one or two shadow values to create form. This style usually looks better with simplified shading than with smooth, realistic gradients. Think in terms of stacked color blocks, soft edge transitions, or poster-like shadow shapes. Keep highlights minimal and use them only where they help sell the material, such as a glossy lamp, a rounded ceramic object, or a shiny hairstyle.

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   6. Make the texture feel analog

   The 70s look becomes believable when the surface feels printed, painted, or scanned rather than digitally perfect. Add paper grain, slight color wobble, dry-brush edges, halftone, dust, or subtle misregistration. You can make this by lightly scumbling colored pencil over paint, using rough brushes, or overlaying scanned paper texture in digital work. Keep the texture visible but not noisy enough to overwhelm the clean shapes.

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   7. Create groovy typography or layout elements

   If your piece includes text, make the letters chunky, rounded, and slightly playful. Common 70s layout choices include arched text, stacked words, oversized headlines, and letters that feel hand-drawn rather than mechanically perfect. Give the typography space to breathe and match its curves to the rest of the composition. A few well-placed words can reinforce the style more effectively than a dense block of copy.

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   8. Finish with warm contrast and small period details

   Review the piece for balance, then deepen shadows and brighten a few accents so the focal point stands out. Add small details that suggest the era, such as wood grain, shaggy carpet texture, rounded furniture legs, vinyl, wallpaper shapes, or sunburst motifs. Do not over-render these details; they should support the mood rather than turn the piece into a catalog illustration. The final image should feel welcoming, slightly nostalgic, and handmade.

Going Digital

In digital painting software, build the artwork in layers: sketch, clean shapes, flat colors, then texture and typography. Use textured brushes with slightly rough edges, and lower the opacity of some layers to mimic print wear and paper absorption. Add a grain or paper overlay on top, then experiment with subtle hue shifts in shadows and highlights to keep the palette earthy and warm. If the image feels too crisp, soften select edges and introduce tiny irregularities in line weight so it feels less vector-clean and more period-authentic.

Common Mistakes

FAQ