Art of Wall Hangings

Decorating Your Home with Wall Pictures

If your home contains a room that seems empty or void of character, adding the right art prints to the walls will add life and color without the need for complicated decorating schemes. Adding art to the walls is one of the easiest and quickest ways to spice up a room. Fine art prints are a crucial feature of your home's interior decorative style. They help tie together the colors and style of furniture and other items in the room. Before purchasing prints to hang on the walls, consider a few things to make your purchases more appropriate. Here are some tips to guide you in the process of decorating your home with art.

 
Choose Your Wall Art for Each Room

The style and function of your home, as well as the mood and ambiance of the decor, needs to align perfectly with your lifestyle. A home built for a large and active family will not work well if you fill it with furniture that can't be used by children. The same concept applies to the process of choosing wall art for your home. Decide on the style for a specific room, and then choose the fine art prints to match it.

Consider the function of the room you're decorating. Bedrooms need different decoration considerations than a kitchen or an office space. Art that would be appropriate in a bathroom may not match the ambiance of a busy living room. For example, consider these questions:

*Will the room be used for entertaining or dinner parties?

*Is the room a personal space, a quiet retreat away from everything else?

*Will children be playing in this room?

*What other activities (hobbies, work, exercise) will take place here?

Once the function of the room is clear, a color theme can be chosen. Color has a great effect on the mood and feeling of occupants, so care needs to be taken to choose an appropriate color. Pale and neutral greens and blues are calming and quiet colors, perfect for bedrooms and bathrooms. Yellows, reds, and oranges are much more lively and bold colors, and work in a playroom or living room that is used often.

Choosing the Correct Style

Just like the color of a room's paint, a piece of art can drastically change or establish the mood in a room. Not only will it pull the different decor elements of any room together, but it can be used to create unique expressions of style.

*Classic & Traditional

*Contemporary or Modern

*Entertaining & Fun

*Relaxed or Casual

*Romantic

The style of any room in your home depends completely on personal choices and taste, and you're free to add your personality into the room with the correct accessories. Try framing a beautiful oil landscape print in a modern styled iron frame, or a bright and fun print in a traditional wood scroll frame.

Modern Art Gallery Style: If you'd like to mimic the clean and modern feeling of a modern art gallery, space pieces at least two feet from each other. Try to space them evenly around the room or space. This works especially well in long spaces, such as hallways or lobbies.

Above the Sofa: Large pieces of furniture already draw the attention in a room, so adding a piece of art above it makes sense. Hang the print at least six to ten inches above the furniture. Aim to hang it about eye level.

"Here are a selection of tips to aid you in the process of hanging your prints in their best locations, and don’t forget to have the right tools on hand like a level, step ladder, "http://www.ashanging.com//">picture hanging rail</a>, hammer, nails, screws etc."




This article and photos were provided by my guest blogger Stephen Rosen of ASHanging.com.

Photos to Canvas

My oldest son Chris took this photo during a recent business trip to China...this was on the tour while walking the Great Wall of China.
You can't hang a digital picture up on your wall like a museum painting. Or can you? It is now possible to take cherished images and put these on canvas. The canvas is the same type of high quality material used for oil paintings. This process will be able to preserve your photograph for up to a hundred years. Once the process of putting the digital photos on canvas is complete, the picture can be hung with or without a frame. I prefer the canvas with no frame. Frames are difficult to match it is also a much less cluttered look.
Why is it worthwhile to put these images on canvas? While digital photos are easy to share with people outside your home, these images are not an ideal median for sharing and displaying photos within your home. What is a person to do when he has guests over and his entire photograph collection is stored on his portable hard drive? It is clear that in situations like these, having your files stored digitally is not beneficial at all. By putting your pictures on canvas you can create your own art gallery in your own home. Except the art wasn't made by a famous artists and the subjects aren't foreign. Instead, you are the artists, and the subjects of your "paintings" are whatever you've taken pictures of: friends, family, vacation spots, etc.
The median of photos on canvas offers an elegance of display that simply cannot be matched by viewing them on a computer screen. While the process can be a little pricey (especially when compared with the fact that sharing digital images is practically free), it is important to remember that the canvas photos are constructed by hand to the most exacting standards, using the highest quality material. And these canvases, when kept in museum conditions, are expected to last over one hundred years.