Artistic elements are in every room, whether you intended to create the look or not. If you take a look around the photos, you have on your walls, on sideboards, and dressing tables and the soft furnishings you have, you’ll notice they either complement or detract from a central theme.
Most homeowners will change their colour scheme every couple of years. When that happens, the rest of the room can take a different feel. While that is the point of redecorating (in some cases), you may feel that something feels off. That’s usually the balance of the room or the mood you feel when you’re in that space after making changes. It’s not always for the better.
To make sure you’re revamping your space to intentionally create the mood and style you want, consider the following five elements of artistic design to create a truly unique display in your home.
The 5 Elements that Make for Great Interior Design with Art Displays that Click!
- Scale
Scale in art refers to sizing, more specifically, the proportion of size compared to another object. When considering scale and proportion for an art display, the other object is always the human body because it’s the scale of the art the viewer sees. That’s why most hanging advice will advise hanging artwork at eye level. That works for hung portraits, paintings and photos. What about sculptures though? How about ornaments, figurines, vases etc.
Soft furnishings can be used in art displays with success because you can make a relatively large frame look smaller in a large room by placing a shelf under it, then surrounding it with a variety of objects to complement the piece.
- Balance
Balance can be asymmetrical or symmetrical. With a symmetrical piece of artwork, you could theoretically put a mirror across the centre of the image, and it’d be the same either side. Asymmetrical won’t be.
Paintings and photographic artwork will be one or the other, but you can decide if you want an asymmetrical or symmetrical art display. For a balanced display, the art would be the same size of frames placed at the same distance apart and hung at the same height around your room. The colour tones would be similar too. An easy way to work out if your room display has balance is to imagine a mirror down the middle of the room. What would the mirror effect be? Off balance or balanced.
- Style
Art displays can be just that, but to make things tighter, creating a unique statement to your display, it’s worth adding additional elements into your display to add style that emphasises your statement. An example could be holiday snaps from an African themed safari trip… pencil sketches of an elephant, a bronze mirror, photo of the jeep, with perhaps a bonsai tree placed on sideboard under the display. Styling your art display is about adding different elements of art, not just framed photographs, paintings, or prints. - Mood
How you hang your artwork and the soft furnishing placed around a room will affect the mood you feel around the space. You can create energetic displays with vibrant colours, enhanced with frames that bring the colour in the prints out or you can go for a more sophisticated mellowing display. The more space there is in a display, the more room there is for the prints to breathe. For a bedroom display, you’d want a relaxing feel. You can do that by increasing the white space between photo frames and objects. For a more fun and energetic feel, perhaps for a hallway, moving frames closer together and using warm colours can bring a more welcoming, energetic feel to your display. - Composition
Artists will use the principles of design and the elements of art to create and design their artwork. In art displays, the purpose of considering composure is to create a storyline. A theme. Think of composition in art displays as you being the visual illustrator, arranging your photos and artwork to tell a story with a theme. The same thing you would do by creating a themed gallery wall. One theme, multiple framed photos, then combine those with the other four elements here and you’d have a stunning gallery wall.