How often do you look at your photos wondering how they could be shown better? If they’re displayed in your sitting room, chances are, the thought will cross your mind on occasion.
It’ll rarely be acted on though, because you’ll likely have repositioned the frames half a dozen times and still be none the wiser as to how to give your frames and the art inside them a home on the walls within your home.
3 Quick Tips to Give Your Art a Place to Belong
- Connect it to the room by the size proportion
It doesn’t matter what size of art you want to display, it’s the size of the frame you use to display it. If you’re hanging a small frame on a high ceiling wall with nothing surrounding it, it’s going to look out of place. Increase the size of the frame and fill it up with a suitably coloured mount board. This would in effect give you three things going on instead of just the one small frame with a picture you could hardly see.
You’d have a frame you liked, then it’d be a break to a suitably coloured mount board, and then in the centre, your picture or art would be sitting proudly. If it is too small and you could be doing with it bigger, get a copy of it, enlarge it (without pixelating the image by going too big) and then frame it.
- Tame the surroundings of framed art
Many a thing is said about creating spectacular gallery walls. Not much is touched on about the actual wall décor that the themed photo gallery displays are hung on. What’s the scene like going around the pictures?
It’s easy to focus too much of your attention solely on the frames you’re hanging and disregard what’s happening around the frame.
Put a black and white picture on a wall painted bright orange and you’ll get a completely different effect from hanging it on a wall painted magnolia. The same with minimalist art in slim aluminium frames that’s supposed to keep a minimalist look but all around it, there’s swirly browns, leafy greens, with red flowers popping off branches. Chances are that it’s the wall paper that’s too loud for the quaint piece of art that’s getting drowned in all the noise.
If the room you want the photos hanging has busy wall paper all around, and you’d like a gallery display, it’d be worth considering making the display wall a feature wall first by giving it a solid grounding colour like a soft beige. If that’s too bland, perhaps create a background with coloured paper and create a template to put over the wall paper so that when the frames are up on the wall, they aren’t surrounded by busyness. To make the background a part of the feature display, make it a different shape than you’re creating with the frames.
- Add finesse with light fixtures hung as accurately as the frames themselves
With the wall colourings, frame and photos or painting hung up on the wall, a terrific finishing touch is to get the lighting just right. Especially if it’s going to be in an area you’ll be seeing it a lot.
You know those areas in the sitting room where you’d rather stare at your art than the rubbish on the TV? Getting the perfect lighting on the art brings the best of it out.
Imagine for a second a group of four square frames, hung in a 2 x 2 grid display? A picture light shining down across all four of the frames will have a better look than a floor lamp in the corner of the room hitting light off just one side of the art.
Look around the photos you have hanging and see which one of those tips would help you make it looked like it belonged there.