As a student at Birmingham School of Art, Armfield was interested in medieval techniques of painting. Like his tutors Arthur Gaskin and Joseph Southall, he painted in egg tempera, a medium that suited his meticulous approach, and in his hands proved delicate and subtle. He published a manual of tempera painting in 1930.

Armfield's unpublished manuscript, My Approach to Art, gave an account of his experiences at the Birmingham School of Art, where he had enrolled in 1899 and learned the technique of painting in tempera:

Apart from invaluable benefit from guidance and advice from such masters as Henry Payne, Arthur Gaskin and Joseph Southall, I really taught myself, as must any one who hopes to do individual work … I detested the Life Class, and rarely attended it: I refused to learn perspective or anatomy as they bored me, and generally, I could not have been a worse student.