Grab your favorite mug and settle in, because I want to tell you how Dark Academia found me.

 

 

 

It started at the art store where I worked part-time. I kept noticing the same handful of customers drifting through, always dressed in deep charcoals and burgundies, hunting for the odder supplies on the shelves. Wax. Old-looking paper. Loose brass findings. They weren’t punks. There were no chains, no skulls, nothing loud about them. Just this quiet, deliberate darkness that felt like it belonged to a different century.

 

 

 

I couldn’t stop watching. Eventually, curiosity won, and I just asked one of them what they were making. That’s when I heard the words Dark Academia for the first time. I went home and fell down the rabbit hole.

 

 

 

Curiosity is the engine that drives how I make art. Every new concept, every mystery, every odd little corner of a story is a place I want to go to before my time here is up. Dark Academia is one of my more recent finds, inviting me to travel into rich tones and sit with old ghosts. I’m still a beginner in it, honestly, but that’s half the fun. I’m elbow deep in it right now, a large canvas, two smaller paintings, a shelf of small curios all soaking in that candlelit, ink-stained mood.

 

 

Once I started my research, I discovered the genre has an interesting story of its own. Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History came out in 1992, and it’s still considered the sacred text of the whole genre, all gothic university halls and brilliant, doomed students. But the aesthetic itself, the mood boards and color palettes and whole visual language we associate with the term today, didn’t exist yet. That came almost thirty years later, when a small corner of Tumblr rediscovered the book around 2015 and started building an entire world around its atmosphere. It really caught fire during the pandemic, when we were stuck inside and aching to connect with something that felt inherently familiar.

 

Dark Academia was never really a trend that got invented; it was rediscovered.

The colors are where this all becomes real for me as a painter. Forget neon, forget flat modern white. Dark Academia lives in deep forest green, warm navy, heavy charcoal, and burgundy so rich it looks like it’s been steeping in wine for a hundred years. Against those, you get soft cream, ivory, and paper that looks tea-stained even when it isn’t, colors that feel like they’re holding their breath.

 

Then there’s the gold. A little antique brass or gold leaf worked in at the edges, just enough to catch candlelight, and suddenly the whole palette feels like it’s glowing from somewhere inside itself. The first time I saw gold leaf catch the light against a dark, aged background, I thought, sure, I was looking into a secret.

This fall, I’m bringing students along on many of my art adventures, and Dark Academia is one I’m excited to open up. Come for the Drama is your chance to play with ideas and colors, ephemera and gold leaf, and see if you, too, find a bit of magic in the idea of secrets buried for the curious adventurer.

 

We’ll spend the afternoon turning expensive-looking design ideas into simple steps anyone can follow. You’ll tear and stain paper until it looks like it’s been sitting in a forgotten archive for a century. You’ll build raised, aged textures with molding paste, and learn just how forgiving real metallic gold leaf is once you know the trick to distressing it. By the end, you’ll have composed a small collection of your choosing- maybe botanicals, moth motifs, wax seals, or a brass ornament- into a finished wood panel piece, an Archivist’s Relic, dark and dimensional, looking like it walked straight out of an old university library and into your hands.

 

You don’t need any art experience to come. Just bring your curiosity and a willingness to get a little dramatic with color and texture. Let’s build something with soul together.

 

If you want to go further down the rabbit hole yourself, the Adobe Express Dark Academia Vibe Guide and the 97 Decor color guide are both worth a browse.