Different rooms throughout your home need different energy levels. The colour of your décor is usually the main way this is created. Pale blues in the bathroom, beige to relax in the living room, and perhaps some greenery in the hallway and kitchen.
Your wall colours can be considered as a background colour for framed prints. Any colour can be transformed with the right art to serve a practical purpose. To instil a sense of balance, a calmness, invoke memories, to invite you (and your guests) to think more deeply about the art hung on your walls, and also to express your own personality.
When you walk into a room and feel the energy levels are somehow off, consider what’s in the room.
… The furniture, the colour scheme, paintings, prints, and photographs.
In a well-designed room, everything can be complementary to everything else around it. Even traditional art displayed beside retro prints can be made to work. That’s called juxtaposition and it is an art style itself that’s used to display two opposing views side-by-side.
When it doesn’t look right, it’s often because of the displays being out of proportion.
Displaying frames with proportionality makes it look better
There are a couple of guidelines for how frames are displayed. The first is to hang it at eye level, which is usually around the 60” mark from the floor level. The other is to frame within proportions and it’s this that matters for above your furniture.
For above sofas, side tables, dining tables, or hanging a print above a chest of drawers or dresser in the bedroom, the frame size is best to be 50% to 75% of the total width of your furniture.
As an example, if you had a chest of drawers that was 105cm (approx. 41”) wide, you would be looking for a frame sizes between 52.5 cm and 78.75cm. Converted to inches, a 20” x 30” picture frame would be an ideal size proportionally. For that, you would need either a big enough print or a multi-aperture photo frame to display multiple photos within the same frame.
The same 50% to 75% proportional guidelines can be applied to frame sizes for above sofas, dining tables, or any furniture that lacks anything around it.
Using Colour Psychology in the Design of Your Room
Colour psychology comes into play when you use your primary wall colour as the background canvas for your framed prints. You are introducing more colours. The frame colour and the colours used in the print as well as the mount board that’s there to protect your print inside the print. Those can be used decoratively, too.
In a bedroom, where you want a sense of calm, wood frames with a neutral mount board or pale cooler colours like mint green or pastel blue can help lower the energy levels. For the bathroom where your wood can be negatively impacted by fluctuating moisture levels, using a lighter shade of aluminium picture frame with a similarly neutral coloured mount board can help create the same relaxed atmosphere in a bathroom.
Think about how certain colours make you feel. Warm tones of red, orange or brighter yellows tend to liven up rooms. Cool blues, mint and lilac have a more relaxing effect.
Whatever energy level you feel your rooms could benefit from, hang some framed art (proportionally) around your existing furniture for an instantaneous transformation.