Add decorative art to your decor

Great art makes for great rooms… period. There are loads of low cost art pieces to choose from and with which to make a huge statement while adding colour and character.

Before you shop for art, think about the style and period of the room, and the story you want your decor to convey. A bright ‘pop art’ canvas in a modern room, for example, or a gold-framed old master hung in a traditional style home will each add to the overall feeling of design ‘relevance’.

And don’t just hang one lonely picture; use multiple art choices to add colour, story and shape. Also consider size as well as subject. The three forest images shown here work well as a triptych (a work of art in three pieces) with the spacing between each spreading out the impact and covering more space. Before drilling holes into your walls, map out your images on the floor to get an idea of spacing and overall size.

To personalize your decor and keep costs down, try painting your own art by buying blank canvases and giving free reign to your imagination. We did this at our Scottish home by sketching over existing photographs on the computer and then projecting them onto canvases. We then drew our outlines and filled them in with naive shading using charcoal, thus creating our very own masterpieces.