Home Decorating Tips: Where to Hang Your Fine Art
Decorating Tip #1. The hand is quicker than the eye.
How high should you hang your wall art? Your art should be hung at eye level. If you are decorating a hallway, where people are commonly standing, eye level could be around 5-6 ft high. If you are decorating a living room where people are commonly sitting, pictures should be hung much lower. You can use your hand as an easy guide. The bottom of the picture should be one hand length above the furniture.
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Decorating Tip #2. Sorry, guys, but yes, size does matter.
How do I decide whether to hang the large print or the small print? The size of your wall art should be proportional to the size of the furniture (or wall if there is no furniture). A large sofa, for example, calls for a large art piece to create balance.
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Decorating Tip #3. What are the odds?
How many prints should go in a grouping? Wall art can be grouped to create a larger footprint on your wall. Not only should the grouped pieces relate to each other in color, subject, and/or genre, but design aesthetic tells us that an odd number of pieces is more visually pleasing than an even number. You can put 3 images in a row or you can try one large piece next to 2 smaller ones. The grouped wall art should be positioned close to each other so that they form a collective unit and act as a single wall hanging.
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Decorating Tip #4. Stay grounded.
Where on the wall do I place my wall art? When decorating your room, think of the entire room like it is a single photograph or painting. Use the same compositional guidelines for your room as you would with a 2-D image. If I asked for a critique on this image, most people would probably say that the window on the top right was distracting as most of the action is going on down by the lower left window where the red meets the white and where the light changes to shade.
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In a room you should keep your wall art grounded to the rest of the furniture in the room, or if there is no furniture, ground one piece of art to another by keeping them in close proximity.
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Decorating Tip #5. The chameleon effect.
With the huge variety of mats and frames out there, how do I choose? While the choice of frame style is likely to hint at whether the image is traditional or modern and should be decided based on both the image and the general style of your home, mats are usually only about the color. The color of your mat will influence which color you see most in the image. This is important to consider because it gives you more options when purchasing the image. If you want your image to match the pale blue in your room, the image does not have to primarily be pale blue to do so. Using a pale blue mat can bring out the smallest hint of pale blue in the image. The color of the frame can act in a similar way if you want to bring out a secondary color. Double mats in two different colors are also used in this same way.
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