Are the walls in your kitchen looking bland? Do they need a touch of inspiration, or do you just feel the need to do something to make the kitchen feel more like yours?
Art is how you do that, and it is easier than you may think.
Start with creative colours
For those who like to explore their culinary creativity in the kitchen, vibrant colours are the way to go. Cool, calm, and neutral are colours best reserved for the bedroom. To excite your mind in the kitchen, choose vibrant colours or neon to burst the senses open and awaken your imagination.
Not sure which colours go with what?
If you have an Android smartphone (Google’s operating system), it uses a dynamic colour selection engine for the colour settings on your phone. Take a picture, set it as your home screen wallpaper and it will display a selection of colour palettes.
As an example, for a picture that is predominantly red, it will show paler shades such as pinks, deep purples and even green. Use that as an idea springboard for your home décor. Soft pink paints, red art printed on canvas, and introduce greenery with plants to tone things down.
Work with plexiglass in the kitchen
The biggest humidity fluctuations happen in the kitchen. That is not the place to display anything valuable. For anything that you plan to display, put it behind the plexiglass (acrylic glazing). Some prints look gorgeous with no glazing, but the kitchen is not the place to experiment with those. Everything hung on the wall in the kitchen should be protected, unless it does not need to be. Examples of wall displays that are safer in kitchens and bathrooms are canvas prints, or ceramic, such as art painted on ceramic plates.
Placement is paramount
Ever spent ages trying to figure out where the best place would be to hang a print? In small places, an easy way to determine where to hang art is to think about which wall would benefit from a window.
Artwork can be a window into another world. It’s much cheaper to hang a new piece of framed art on a wall than it is to knock it through to install a window.
The personal touch
Home décor is all about personalising your space to you. Think about what you do most in your kitchen and that’s the type of food print poster to display. That could be a poster of cocktail drinks, a canvas print of a recipe, a large print of a coffee cup for the coffee aficionado, or a print of fruit and vegetables for the home veg grower.
Pay attention to the photo frame material
Not all picture frames are created equal. For the kitchen, you need anything to be as moisture resistant as possible and for the frame to not be displayed near heat sources. The closer anything is to the cooker, a coffee maker or the kettle that gives off loads of steam, the more distance you need. Even at that, heat builds up.
Wood picture frames can be varnished or painted with a heat resistant paint. Not all coloured wood frames are heat resistant. The wood may be, but the paint can flake. For better heat protection, consider using a coloured metal picture frame for posters rather than wood, which is more prone to warping under the stress of high humidity and temperature fluctuations.