The Do's and Dont's of Decorating With Wall Art
At The Metal Shack, we’re a little bit crazy about wall art. For years, we have been creating high-quality metal signs that are inspiring and empowering. We love to see our work hanging in people’s homes, and seeing the creative ways that people display our signs.
However, not everyone is an interior design aficionado, and if you aren’t, you might not be jumping out of your seat to talk about how excited you are to go home and mount artwork on your wall. While some people have an innate gift for interior design, a lot of people don’t, and that’s totally fine.
In this blog, we’re going to go over the dos and don’ts of hanging wall art in your home. If you’re part of that group that isn’t blessed with the gift of being a home decoration guru, you might find some of these tips useful.
DO: Decorate Most of Your Walls
If you go into any home that has superior interior design, you’ll find a commonality between them — most of the walls will be adorned with tasteful decorations. There is usually a variety here — wall art, tapestries, framed pictures, clocks, and so on. The point is that you seldom see a wall that’s completely bare.
Adding wall art and mounted decorations is a good way to add energy to a room, and, when done well, can create a visual “pathway” that guides the eyes of anyone who enters. Blank walls are a drag — they can make a room feel smaller than it is, or have the opposite effect, making the room feel big and empty. Neither of these are desirable outcomes.
As a rule of thumb, decorate most of your walls! If you’ve been wondering how to spice up your home, this might be the way, especially if your walls are bare.
DON’T: Decorate Every Single Wall
This clashes somewhat with our last point, but it’s important. There is such a thing as your walls being too cluttered, and you should consider how negative space can sometimes be a good thing — that is, space that’s not filled with any kind of decoration.
With that in mind, sometimes it’s more tasteful to leave a wall bare or to show restraint on walls that you are decorating. The trick here is to start small and scale up. Place your wall art and decorations wherever you feel like it is needed the most, and expand from there. If you’ve created a satisfying, fulfilling space without filling all your walls up, then you should probably trust your gut — don’t fill in the negative space unless you can just tell it’s missing a certain something.
DO: Have a Variety
As manufacturers and sellers of metal wall art pieces, we’d be lying if we said we wouldn’t be overjoyed if you just up and ordered a cart full of our metal signs. However, we’d also mention that, as lovely as our signs are, plastering all your walls with them might not create the best visual effect. We would tell you to space them out tactfully and naturally to avoid excessively using the same type of art multiple instances in one room.
If you want to skilfully decorate a room, using the same kind of decoration over and over will bring the overall look down. The phrase “less is more” is often true here. One well-placed piece of artwork can define an entire room, and draw people’s gaze to it naturally. But when you place another one next to it, and another one and another one, the uniqueness of the original piece starts to get lost among the noise, and your room just ends up looking cluttered and busy.
Our metal signs, in particular, are very bold in their design. We would encourage you to find appropriate locations to mount them so they define the room they’re in. But if you have multiple signs, consider spacing them out into other rooms — this will ensure that each one has its own unique authority wherever it’s mounted, without being drowned out.
DON’T: Create Confusion
As a counterpoint to what we just said above, variety is important, but you want to make sure you’re maintaining some kind of consistent style or motif in your home. In other words, too much variety can be confusing and off-putting.
Take our metal wall decor, for example. Most of our wall art is text art, based off inspiring scriptures and motivating quotes. While it’s easy to see why one wouldn’t want this to be the only design language in their home, it would be equally as weird to have a bunch of other decorations that don’t flow with each other.
If you hang up one of our scripture quotes, put a death metal poster next to it, a framed unicorn picture next to that, and then an old Bavarian cuckoo clock to finish it off, it’s just going to look bizarre because none of the pieces work together.
You then have to wonder — what is the intent? Which piece of art is the most accurate reflection of the host’s interests? Keep it simple — you want visual variety, but make sure your decorations work together.
DO: Figure Out the Scale
This is kind of a big one, and could potentially be broken down into multiple points, but the gist of it is this — for every wall, there is a certain “region” where wall art should ostensibly go. This region can change relative to the furniture that’s placed around it. For example, if you place a sofa in front of a wall, most wall art is going to look best centered above the couch, more or less equidistant from the furniture and ceiling. Moving it up too high will create a visual imbalance, leaving the couch looking weirdly small, and hanging it too low will make it feel like the room is closing in on you.
Size is also important — if you hang up a piece of wall art that’s too small, you’ll know it instantly, and the same usually goes for pieces that are too large. Wall art should fill a space adequately and not leave the wall wanting for more adornment. If your wall art is too small, consider grouping it together with multiple pieces that create a unifying collage or composition.
DON’T: Mount or Hang Everything
Finally, one good way to experiment with your walls is to not hang or mount every single decoration. Some pieces can look good by leaning against the wall resting on the floor (such as a large mirror), or by resting on a shelf or drawer unit, such as one of our smaller wall art pieces.
This is one where we can’t give any explicit guidelines, save to experiment. Even if you’re not a pro interior designer, you most likely have at least some kind of intuition that lets you identify when something just doesn’t look right. Try leaning some of your wall art! If it feels wrong, trust your instinct. If it feels right, great!
Shop Metal Wall Decor and Inspiring Signs
Now that you have the rundown on how to get the most out of your wall decorating, why not order some of our metal wall signs? We offer a variety of inspiring products, from inspirational signs to empowering scripture text art. All of our signs are made from powder-coated metal, and we can attest to their durability and longevity. We know you’ll love ordering from the Metal Shack. Browse our online store today, and feel free to contact us if you have any questions!