No matter how gorgeous the interior furnishings of your home, a room with bare walls always feels incomplete, and often humdrum. Art is an essential ingredient for home, it’s like punctuation to a sentence — without it, a room lacks the layers and attitude. However, there are no established rules while buying the interior design paintings or hanging them in your home — a statement piece of art can be placed or you can consider hanging several personality pieces of varying styles, shapes, and sizes in the same room together.
Don’t get baffled by the limitless options available, we’ll make it a cinch and help you walk through the essential steps you can take to find the perfect artworks for every space in your home:
1. Choosing Interior Design Paintings
The first and most important thing that you need to figure out is deciding on the decor style you want to set up in your home. It is most likely that you don’t even know what interior design style fascinates you. Do not fret, get down and explore some of the most popular looks online and see what resembles your taste and suits your energy. Once you know what your style is, it will lay the foundation for the kind of art you should look for.
For example, you have a modern Hamptons style home, it will automatically dictate a particular colour palette. Hamptons homes are crisply white, with vibrant pops of blue, hues of grey, sometimes black, often with accents of gold. The interior decor style is soft, serene, and sophisticated, so it would be quite weird if you place a bright red painting with a street art influence.
The same goes for a house having an industrial interior design scheme. With a set up dominated by exposed bricks, metal chairs, concrete and often a fair amount of black blotches on walls. Hanging a piece of art featuring soft pink roses in a white frame would not be just as weird but upset the entire scheme you’ve got going on.
So, always begin by taking the time to thoroughly assess the style of your space first. It will not only ease your search but let you choose the right kind of artwork for your home.
2. Decide The Focal Point
Every room in the home needs a dominating focal point so that when you walk into the space, it’s the first thing you notice. That’s the room’s focal point which defines the entire expanse.
Now, art can prove to be an amazing focal point. But so can be a colorful rug, a vibrant piece of furniture, stunning lighting or a pendant lamp in your living room. Or it could be a sumptuous quilt cover set in your bedroom.
The moral of the story is: every room should only have one commanding focal point. In case you already have one, choose an artwork that’s subtle and not heavily patterned, or simply less imposing (But it in no way means that the art has to be small). If your space doesn't have a focal point yet (and the room feels dull and boring) then choose a painting for the room that feels more visually striking.
3. Figure Out The Right Size
This is where most of the people go absolutely wrong — in fact, the aspect of scale is often neglected or not even thought about. It’s quite common to find a huge wall adorning a tiny painting, or a huge wide wall having four small frames of art hung positioned miles apart. We all know that bigger pieces of art are more expensive, but it’s definitely worth the splurge to enhance the look of your space so that it does not end up being off-kilter.
Certainly, it’s a bit difficult to define exactly the size of interior design paintings that you should get for your room, but it should always be in proportion to the space available. For example, a painting should span almost the entire width of the headboard of your bed, if hung in the space where you break the bread, it should always run almost the full width of the dining table. If it’s placed above a cabinet, the same rule applies, it should span almost the full length, but never go beyond it. In case, there is no furniture below the wall space where the art is to be hung, it’s size should cover a substantial amount of that wall.
And the golden rule you should always remember: measure your bed, or sideboard, or table using tape before you go shopping for the painting. Keeping the exact measurements in mind, look for a piece that suits your requirements. At the same time, it will also help avoid being swayed by the wrong one.
4. Single Statement Piece Or Smaller Ones
Often, for a spot like above a bed’s headboard, you are left wondering if you buy one large piece or two-three smaller ones. It actually does not matter what you go for, as long as the piece spans the entire width of the headboard. One thing to keep in check is that you hang the smaller artworks at a gap of about 10 to 20cm.
While deciding to buy one statement artwork or two also depends on other decor items of the room. For example, in a living room with two walls across from each other, you should always vary the artworks. You can place one large painting on one wall, and two smaller pieces on the other wall. If you hang paintings of the same size directly across from one another, it would look weird, repetitive, a dull mirror image.
You can go for creating an interesting grid of artworks, or a trio or tetrad of paintings on some walls in the room too. It’s all about figuring out the size of the wall you have to fill, and then top it up with something. It could be a single painting, two pieces, three or four grids, and so on.
5. Go For Canvas or Framed Art
Though crucial, it is advisable not to get too caught up on this aspect, it’s usually a more personal choice. However, be mindful of the quality of the artwork, a plush base of art definitely makes it look more gorgeous and high-end.
Unframed canvas art can look more cool and relaxed on walls, but most of the studios and galleries that sell canvas art without frames sell it this way because it’s definitely cheaper to produce. And because of that, it can often look cheaper on your walls.
The exception to this rule established above is to buy original art, something where an artist has put his/her heart and soul on quality canvas. The difference between a grand canvas and something a budget chain sells at a huge discount can easily be spotted by you. All you need is a deep observation.
Ideally, framed canvas art looks a bit more upmarket and palatial. It’s the preferred choice of many popular interior designers and art lovers. For example, decking up a black frame around a canvas painting often gives it a bit more presence in space and elegance. On the other hand, a framed art behind a panel of glass can look the most high-end.
In case you opt for exploring glass art, think about sunlight flooding the room, and when it comes to the art behind glass, the glare makes the design barely visible. It defeats the whole purpose of placing a painting on your walls, making space look more mundane and messed up.
6. Go For Art That You Love
By now, you should have a fair idea of how to correctly set up the interior design with painting. You have figured out the home decor style. You have decided if you want the artwork to simply complement the space or stand out as a focal point. Also, the size and the aspects of scale, dimensions are sorted. The last piece of the puzzle that is to be worked upon is to find art that perfectly adheres to all these factors and is something you genuinely connect with and love.
Visiting a gallery or exploring art online, you will have enough interior design painting ideas at your disposal, but don’t get stuck with something that does not fit with the look of your home.
Final Words
If you follow the guidelines above, you will know exactly how to buy the right artwork for your home when you’re in-store or shopping online. You might find it funny that the design of the artwork itself does not hold great significance to get it right, but it’s true. Once, all other crucial factors are in order, then you finally get down to exploring the design of the painting, certainly in the last leg of the search!