50+ AI Art Styles You Won't Find Elsewhere

1. Historical Art Movements (Reimagined in AI)

Art Deco

Ideal for: Projects needing vintage glamour, architectural concepts, stylish posters, geometric patterns.

Art Deco captures the bold geometric forms and symmetrical design of the 1920s and '30s, infusing a luxurious, vintage glamour into every project.

You can incorporate tokens such as neon outlines, metallic textures like gold or chrome, and backgrounds featuring starry or geometric elements in your prompts.

Tip: With its bold geometric forms, Art Deco is ideal for seamless pattern design. For instance, you can use the --tile parameter in Midjourney to trigger the option. For detailed instruction, read the guide of best Midjourney seamless pattern prompts.

Art Nouveau

Ideal for: Decorative designs, fantasy illustrations, elegant portraits, poster art.

Art Nouveau is characterized by flowing, organic lines (whiplash curves), intricate patterns, and decorative motifs inspired by nature.

To simulate the style, you can include terms like whiplash lines, stained glass, natural forms, stylized floral patterns in the AI art prompts.

Medieval Illustration

Ideal for: Fantasy settings, historical themes, decorative patterns, storytelling with a classic feel.

Medieval illustration features illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, and woodcut prints for AI art styles. Its use of flat perspectives and symbolic imagery imbues artwork with a timeless, storied quality.

Tip: You can use tokens like illuminated manuscript style, medieval tapestry, woodblock print in your prompts.

Baroque

Ideal for: Dramatic portraits and scenes, opulent interiors, creating a sense of grandeur and emotion.

Evoking the 17th-century aesthetic, Baroque art is characterized by intense drama, rich, deep colors, strong contrasts between light and shadow (chiaroscuro), and highly ornate detailing.

Impressionism

Ideal for: Landscapes, portraits, cityscapes with a soft, vibrant, and light-filled feel.

Impressionism beautifully mimics the 19th-century art movement's focus on capturing the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, often depicting everyday scenes with visible, distinct brushstrokes.

Cubism

Ideal for: Abstract portraits, still lifes, complex conceptual pieces.

Cubism radically breaks down subjects into geometric shapes, simultaneously depicting them from multiple viewpoints to create fragmented and abstract compositions. You can guide the AI towards this style by including terms such as geometric abstraction, fragmented perspective, and multiple viewpoints, or including the artists name for style reference.

Dadaism

Ideal for: Provocative images, unconventional compositions, exploring conceptual themes.

Inspired by the early 20th-century avant-garde movement, Dadaism embraces absurdity, irrationality, collage and photomontage techniques, and distinct anti-art sentiments to produce unconventional and often provocative results.

When crafting AI art prompts for this style, you can experiment with absurdist, photomontage, readymade objects, and nonsensical.

Pop Art

Ideal for: Vibrant posters, commercial-style graphics, commentary on consumer culture.

Pop Art draws heavily from mid-20th century mass culture, advertising imagery, and comic books, utilizing bright, bold colors, distinct outlines, and recognizable subject matter.

To replicate this iconic look popularized in the 1950s and '60s, reference famous artists like Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, or incorporate descriptors like bold flat colors, Ben-Day dots, or comic book style into your AI art prompts.

Psychedelic Art

Ideal for: Album covers, posters, abstract explorations, visually representing altered states.

Strongly associated with 1960s counterculture, Psychedelic Art features heavily distorted visuals, intricate swirling patterns, intense, often vibrating color palettes, and surreal or dreamlike subject matter.

Achieve this distinctive aesthetic in your AI art styles with terms such as swirling patterns, vibrant kaleidoscopic colors, hallucinatory, or by noting op art influences.

Op Art / Optical Art

Ideal for: Abstract backgrounds, creating visual tension, designs that play with perception.

Op Art, short for Optical Art, skillfully employs geometric patterns, precise linework, and sharp color contrasts to create fascinating optical illusions that suggest movement, vibration, or hidden forms.

To generate these AI art styles, use descriptive keywords like geometric patterns, optical illusion, moiré effect, and contrasting colors in your AI art prompts.

Postmodernism

Ideal for: Complex conceptual art, layered imagery, designs that reference or critique other styles.

Postmodernism represents an eclectic range of art styles emerging in the late 20th century, frequently characterized by irony, pastiche (mixing various styles), deconstruction of forms, and the deliberate blurring of boundaries between high art and popular culture.

2. Traditional Mediums Emulation

Oil Painting

AI art style of oil painting captures the rich, layered textures and visible brushstrokes characteristic of traditional oil paintings.

You can incorporate terms like oil painting, impasto, or thick brushstrokes into your AI art prompts to achieve this effect.

Watercolor

Watercolor emulation reflects the delicate washes, soft edges, and organic blending found in traditional watercolor paintings.

To guide the AI towards this style, use phrases such as watercolor, soft washes, or transparent layers in your AI art prompts.

Pastel/Charcoal Sketch

This style emulates the look of hand-drawn sketches using pastels or charcoal, emphasizing subtle gradients and tactile qualities.

3. Mixed Media, Handcrafted or Hybrid Styles

Risograph Style

Ideal for: Retro posters, zines, illustrations needing a vintage, tactile print feel.

The Risograph style replicates the distinct look of Risograph printing, characterized by its grainy textures, limited yet often vibrant color palettes, and subtle misalignments. It's a popular choice among AI art styles for achieving a vintage, tactile print aesthetic that feels handcrafted.

Collage Art

Collage Art assembles diverse elements like images, textures, and text into a unified composition, mimicking both physical and digital techniques.

You can specify materials like torn paper collage, photomontage, vintage ephemera collage, digital collage. for this AI art style.

Embroidery Art Styles

Embroidery Art Styles replicate the distinct appearance of thread stitched onto fabric, capturing various stitch types and their resulting textures within the generated image.

You can specify stitch types like cross-stitch, satin stitch, crewel embroidery, thread painting.

Origami/Papercraft

Ideal for: Charming illustrations, children's book style, unique invitations, UI elements with tactile feel.

Papercraft is one of the delightful art styles for AI prompts that creates the charming illusion of artwork constructed from cut, folded, and layered paper. It often emphasizes visible edges and a sense of depth, successfully mimicking the tactile appeal of physical paper creations in a digital format.

Tip: Besides papercraft, you can also experiment with layered paper, cut paper art, kirigami style, or paper quilling in your prompts.

Quilling Art

Ideal for: Decorative elements, typography, intricate patterns, card designs.

Quilling Art specifically simulates the delicate technique of rolling, shaping, and gluing strips of paper together to form intricate, filigree-like designs.

Tokens to trigger the AI art style: rolled paper strips, paper filigree, quilled paper art, etc.

4. Retro and Vintage-Inspired Styles

Pixel Art

Ideal for: Retro game art, nostalgic scenes, simple character designs, digital icons.
Pixel Art draws direct inspiration from the classic 8-bit and 16-bit video game eras, creating images characterized by their blocky appearance and limited color palettes for a distinctly retro digital feel.

Tips: To readily use the assets in your project, include isolated on a transparent background in your prompts.

For those who love the charm of bygone eras, these styles bring back a vintage flair.

Retro Futurism

Retro Futurism blends imaginative concepts of the future with the specific design aesthetics popular in the past, often channeling the optimistic yet naive style of mid-20th century science fiction illustrations.

You can incorporate phrases like atompunk, raygun gothic, 1960s futuristic, or mid-century sci-fi illustration into your prompts.

VHS/Analog Aesthetic

This aesthetic faithfully mimics the visual imperfections and characteristics of old videotapes and analog television screens. It intentionally introduces elements like visible grain, horizontal scan lines, color bleeding, and slight distortions to create a specific nostalgic or lo-fi atmosphere

Popular tokens to use in the AI art prompts:

80s nostalgia, found-footage style visuals, music video concepts, analog television static, recorded on videotape, VHS screen grab, scan lines effect, etc.

5. Conceptual Styles and Aesthetics

Pop Surrealism

Tokens to use: pop surrealism, lowbrow art, dreamlike, surreal, exaggerated features, etc.

Pop Surrealism blends the familiar elements of popular culture with the dreamlike, often illogical nature of surrealism, frequently using exaggerated proportions or unexpected juxtapositions.

This distinct choice among AI art styles often explores themes like nostalgia, irony, and the subconscious through accessible, vibrant imagery.

Minimalism

Minimalism emphasizes simplicity and intention, focusing on clean lines, uncluttered compositions, geometric shapes, and often a restricted color palette.

You can use minimalist design, clean lines, simple composition, limited color palette, or negative space to achieve this aesthetic.

Science Fiction (Sci-Fi)

Ideal for: Concept art for games/films, book covers, illustrating futuristic ideas, and beyond.

As a broad category, Science Fiction depicts imaginative concepts rooted in future possibilities, often involving space travel, advanced technology, alien life, or altered social structures.

Some of my favorite phrases are: biopunk illustration, dystopian cityscape, retro sci-fi poster, hard science fiction spaceship design, and alien landscape.

Botanical Art

Ideal for: Nature illustrations, decorative patterns, textile designs, scientific diagrams.

Botanical Art centers on the meticulous and often scientifically accurate representation of plants, flowers, fungi, and related subjects. It emphasizes detail, form, and the natural beauty of its subjects.

You can include some of these phrases into the AI art prompts: herbarium specimen sheet, scientific botanical illustration, vintage botanical print, detailed floral drawing and more.

Microbial Art/Bio-Art

Ideal for: Abstract textures, unique pattern design, scientific illustration, biopunk or body-horror themes.

If you love abstract AI image styles, you will love the Microbial aesthetics. It draws direct inspiration from the intricate patterns, textures, and forms found at the microscopic level, such as bacteria colonies, cellular structures, or viruses.

You can use phrases like micro photography, bacteria colony patterns, petri dish art, cellular structures, or microscopic view for the prompts.

Glitch Art

Glitch Art intentionally embraces and aesthetically celebrates digital or analog errors and imperfections.

It manifests through visual disruptions like pixelation, color distortions, screen tearing, data moshing, and erratic artifacts to create an often chaotic and experimental look.

You can prompt with keywords like glitch effect, pixelation, color distortion, scan lines, digital artifact, datamoshing, or screen tear.

Abstract Data/Information Visualization Art

Rather than creating literal charts, it uses data as a foundation for generating aesthetic patterns, color mappings, and forms, essentially creating data paintings.

You can experiment with prompts like data visualization as abstract art, algorithmic pattern generation, generative art from data, or information aesthetics.

Holographic

Holographic styles combine patterns and structures with iridescent, shifting colors that mimic the appearance of holograms.

Tip: Use combinations like holographic texture, iridescent, or shifting colors wireframe, in your AI art prompts.

Installation Art

When using this style with AI, the goal is typically to generate images representing potential installation art—which could be sculptural, environmental, light-based, or interactive.

Low Poly Art

Low Poly Art employs simplified, angular geometric shapes (polygons) with flat shading, reminiscent of early 3D video game graphics but utilized for a clean, modern aesthetic.

You can use terms like low polygon count, faceted surfaces, geometric simplification, flat shaded 3D model aesthetic, or simply low poly illustration in your AI art style prompts.

6. Illustration and Animation Styles

Anime Art

Anime Art is one of the highly popular choices among AI art styles. You can refine the output by specifying eras or sub-styles within your AI art prompts, such as 90s anime aesthetic, Studio Ghibli style, or Shonen anime action pose.

If you are with Midjourney, you can read the complete guide of Niji prompts for anime styles.

Cartoon Art

Cartoon styles can be used for children's content, humorous illustrations, character concepts, mascot design, and more.

You can include specific styles like classic Fleischer cartoon, modern flat design cartoon, Pixar style character in your prompts.

Scribble Art

Scribble Art is defined by its loose, energetic, and sometimes chaotic lines, resembling rapid sketches or intentional scribbles.

You can use prompts like charcoal scribble, rough sketch, energetic line art.

Graffiti

Graffiti AI art style is ideal for: Urban typography, background elements, and character designs with street edge. It adds an edgy, contemporary urban feel to visuals.

Coloring Book Style

The Coloring Book style is designed to look like a page ready for coloring. You can generate these images effectively by prompting for coloring book for adults/children, black and white outline, or bold line art.

Abstract Line Art

Abstract Line Art focuses on the qualities of lines themselves—their weight, density, and flow—to create non-representational compositions. This style explores form, movement, and texture purely through linework.

7. Photorealistic Styles

Photorealistic Styles

Photorealistic images aim to mimic the detail, lighting, depth, and overall appearance of a high-resolution photograph. The goal is to make the generated image virtually indistinguishable from a real photo.

Tip: You can experiment with tokens such as motion blur, shallow depth of field, long exposure trails, lens flare, soft focus zoom blur, and more.

Vintage Photography

Vintage Photography replicates the characteristic look and feel of older photographic methods, often incorporating elements like sepia toning, film grain, light leaks, faded colors, or the specific visual traits of a certain era.

Tip: Specify the desired era or process clearly in your prompts, for instance: 35mm photography of [subjects] 1920s black and white photo, daguerreotype portrait, Polaroid photo, analog film or Kodachrome film look.

Tools and Platforms for AI Art Creation

Each of these platforms offers unique features and capabilities, so explore each to see which aligns best with your creative vision.

• ChatGPT's Image Generator (4o): Great for quick experiments and edit with prompts.
• Midjourney: Known for its expansive style library, it lets you fine-tune your artistic outputs.
• DALL·E Ideal for high-resolution and detailed digital paintings.
• Stable Diffusion: Open-source tool with full customization, fine-tuning, and control over outputs.

For free options, check out the list of Open Source AI Image Generators.

Bonus Tips: Batch Upscale AI Art to 4K/8K with Details

AI art can sometimes feel almost perfect—except for those low-res (often around 768 or 1024 pixels), pixelated edges or blurry details when zooming in. Yes, some generators have built-in upscalers, but processing images one by one can really slow down your creative flow, turning a 10-minute project into an hour of tedious clicking.

That's where tools like Aiarty Image Enhancer come in. Think of it as a finishing step for your AI art creations. It's AI models tackle the gritty stuff—noise, artifacts, blur—while scaling images to HQ resolutions (we're talking 16K/32K). Best part? It handles batches in offline mode, so you can enhance up to 3,000 images per task in 1-click.

Testimonial from Artist @AlexTavern

This picture is from my Future City series. I use Aiarty Image Enhancer to upscale it to 8K, with the Gen-Detail model to generate details and textures. Feel free to use it as a wallpaper, book cover, phone background, or print it out for wall décors.

How to Upscale AI Art in Aiarty Image Enhancer with Clear Details

Step 1. Download and install Aiarty Image Enhancer on your computer, then drop your images in.

You can add AI art images from Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Leonardo AI, Luma, Recrate, and any other AI image generators. It also supports upscaling photos, anime stills, restoring old photos, etc.

Step 2. Pick an AI model for upscaling and enhancement.

Use "More-Detail GAN v3" model for upscaling with realistic details generated, "AIGCsmooth v3" for more clarity and smoother outputs, or "Real-Photo" to rescue low resolution photos.

Aiarty Image Enhancer also has the latest AI Face Restoration feature built-in, which are rescue low-res faces in AI art or photos, or fix distorted faces.

Step 3. Choose the target resolution or scaling factors.

Pick how much you want to upscale (2x, 4x, 8x) or choose a target resolution like 4K or 8K. You can also use 1x just to enhance quality without changing the size.

Step 4. Batch upscale and export the images.

You can use the previewer for real-time inspection.

Once you are happy with the upscale results, click "RUN" to batch export the AI art images.

Final Thoughts

With over 50 styles explored, from historical simulation to photorealism, it's clear that AI offers an incredible palette for visual creation. We hope this curated list serves as a valuable reference and ignites your curiosity to push the boundaries of your own AI art.

Don't let technical limitations like resolution hold you back. Leverage tools like the suggested platforms and enhancers like Aiarty to ensure your final pieces shine with the quality they deserve.

Now it's your turn. Take these ideas, experiment wildly, and start crafting your own unique visual masterpieces.