Finding My Art Style: Candy Decay

How Did I Learn to Paint Like This?

I get asked this question a lot lately, and the answer is… it’s not one single thing.

It’s years of collecting little skills, experimenting, failing, changing directions, and somehow everything came together in the end.

First of all, I’ve been drawing and painting for years.

For a long time I painted portraits, especially eyes. I think this trained my brain more than anything else. At some point you don’t just see an eye anymore—you notice every tiny reflection, every shadow, every subtle color shift. Once you truly learn to observe, you can learn to paint almost anything.

I also spent a lot of time creating abstract art, simply playing with colors, textures and shapes without worrying too much about realism. Looking back, I think this was incredibly important. It taught me to experiment instead of trying to be perfect. Over time I naturally developed favorite color combinations and palettes that simply felt right.

People often ask me if I studied color theory.

Honestly… only the basics.

Most of what I know comes from painting hundreds of artworks rather than memorizing color wheels. I spent years drawing digitally, experimenting with abstract paintings, and later creating around fifty colorful wooden panels in a very similar style. Somewhere along the way, my brain simply started recognizing what worked.

It became intuition.

One thing that completely changed how I paint was focusing less on the actual color and much more on the value—how light or dark something is. A tree doesn’t have to be green. It can be purple with light blue or pink reflections and still feel believable if the values are right. Once I understood that, choosing colors became so much less stressful. I stopped asking myself, "What color should this be?" and started asking, "How light or dark should this be?"

Ironically, I think that’s one reason my unrealistic colors still feel convincing. Another reason is detail. I spend a lot of time painting tiny reflections, glossy highlights, scratches and little textures. Our brains naturally associate those details with realism. So even if the colors are completely impossible, the lighting and surface information still make everything feel believable.

I also don’t think you need to paint everything from imagination. I use references all the time—sometimes twenty different ones for a single artwork.

For me it’s almost like building a collage inside my head. If I’m painting a mackerel sitting on an ice cream cone, I’ll study a real mackerel, melting ice cream, maybe an eyeball if one is hidden somewhere, different lighting situations and textures. Then I combine everything into my own little universe.

Because I’ve painted so many different things over the years, my brain slowly built a visual library. Every object teaches you something. Every painting gives you another texture, another reflection or another shadow that you can use again later.

Another huge influence on my style was digital art.

For quite a while I mostly illustrated guitar effect pedals. Not exactly the most exciting subject, so I constantly asked myself, "How can I make this oddly satisfying?"

Digital art taught me to exaggerate highlights, create clean shadows, add playful lettering and think about compositions in a very graphic way. Even today I try to recreate that slightly polished digital feeling with acrylic markers, glossy varnish and resin.

It also taught me something else: you don’t always have to render every tiny detail perfectly. Sometimes suggesting a texture is much stronger than copying it exactly. That lesson stayed with me.

Something else that helped me enormously was studying other artists.

And honestly, I think copying artworks for practice is one of the fastest ways to improve. Not to sell them. Not to pretend they’re yours. Just to understand why they work.

Why those colors feel harmonious. Why your eye moves through the composition. Why one brushstroke creates depth while another one doesn’t. Every artist I admired taught me something, and eventually all those influences mixed together until they no longer looked like anyone else’s work.

They became mine.

Then life happened.

I went through experiences that completely changed my perspective, and without consciously planning it, darker themes slowly entered my paintings. Decay, bones, skulls and bittersweet nostalgia became part of my work almost naturally. I’ve always been drawn to melancholy. I love combining sweetness with sadness, cute things with decay. I want my paintings to create emotion—sometimes comfort, sometimes nostalgia, and sometimes that strange little feeling you can’t quite explain.

When you finally start moving toward what genuinely excites you, the biggest secret isn’t talent. It’s repetition. Practice. Curiosity. And giving yourself permission to make hundreds of bad paintings before making one you’re truly proud of.

Good materials help too. They won’t magically make you a better artist, but they remove unnecessary frustration and make experimenting so much easier. I also painted with oils for a while, carefully building tiny details with brushes. Standing, sitting, leaning over a table in impossible positions—every medium teaches your hands something different.

You don’t need an art degree. My path certainly wasn’t straight, but eventually I arrived somewhere that finally feels like me. And of course, I’m still learning. I hope I always will.

Maybe the most important ingredient, though, is simply having a weird imagination.

Sometimes I look at the most ordinary object imaginable—a banana—and ask myself what the strangest thing that could possibly happen to it would be.

Maybe a chicken rides it across the ocean while fishing for strawberries. Maybe a flying fish passes by. Maybe there are tiny hidden bones, little messages, skulls and absurd details scattered everywhere.

My brain constantly asks, "What if?"

And then I paint the answer.

That’s how my little Candy Decay worlds are created: tiny impossible places that somehow still feel real.

If you'd like more painting lessons, check out How to Improve as an Artist: 15 Tips, go behind the scenes of my materials in My Candy Decay Art Process, or explore the finished originals this style eventually became.