Picture this: you have just moved into your dream home, whether it be a small studio apartment or a full-sized, 3 story luxury home, and you are trying to decorate the unfurnished home to the best of your ability. One of the best ways to decorate your walls easily is to hang photos and artwork on them. Though, sometimes it can be quite difficult to pick spots to hang them, so that brings up a big question: where should you hang photos? Today, we hope to answer that question by giving you some tips on where to hang photos and how to pick the best spot to hang photos, while also telling you some of the reasons why our new product, Levitate Hanger, makes that physical process much easier too.
Though there is an important thing that we should stress: while this article will contain what we believe are excellent guides for hanging photos in your home, we feel it important to stress this: be as creative as you wish. At the end of the day, decorating your home is a very personal thing, and it is impossible to truly quantify what will work for you, the reader, in specific. That being said, we hope you can take some of these options and use them to make the decorating process easier if you are struggling with it.
Map Out Your Home
One of the first things you should do is get a visual or mental map of how your home looks. This can be done in a variety of ways, but they all have the same goal: figure out how your home looks in terms of the walls in your house.
One method is simply mapping it out in your head by walking around and looking over everything. This works for small studio apartments and one-story homes considering their small size. Another one that works for both small and large homes is to get whatever your preferred way of note-taking is - pen and paper, a drawing app on your phone, a notebook - and draw out your home. Every wall, on every floor, including doorways. It does not have to be perfect by any means, but it is a very helpful way to figure out what places would be best for you to hang photos.
You can use this map to figure out which areas will have the highest traffic and what you should hang as a consequence: things like artwork can be hung in living rooms, dining rooms, and hallways, while personal family photos can be hung in bedrooms. Vacation photos can practically be hung anywhere as well. Again, a lot of this is down to how you view it, but if you’re decorating to showcase to guests, this is a general guide to follow.
Get A Visual on The Room
Once you’ve mapped out your entire home, take a walk around it and look over all of your walls. While most walls are going to be simple drywall, there may be certain ones that are unique, like wood, tile, and other such wall types. Therefore, it is best to know which walls you have. While you do not need to map this out as you do your home, you should generally take note of what is what.
Some of the most important things to take into consideration, and how Levitate Hanger will enhance or ease the process, are as follows:
- How well lit is the room? Certain pictures fit better with how natural and artificial lighting affects it. Bright, cheery photos of family memories should go into brightly lit rooms, while rooms that are generally dark could fit moody art pieces
- The size of the room: smaller rooms generally aren’t going to be very friendly for a giant canvas, nor would a solitary family photo be wise to hang on a giant wall. ou should take measurements of the photos and artwork you have versus the width and height of the wall you wish to hang your photos on
- The coloration of the walls: your wall colors are going to have a similar influence on the lighting of the room, though it will matter more with the frame of the picture. The coloration of the photo or art should still be taken into consideration though to try and make the colors either contrast or complement one another. This treads into color theory, which we will discuss later.
- The material of the walls: while there is some overlap with the coloration here, this is more of a practical point. Hanging photos will be awkward on things like wood and metal is going to be far more difficult than hanging it on drywall. However, with Levitate Hanger, this is made a non-issue
- The furniture in the room: If your furniture is already in the house, you can match it with your furniture. This is more of a spacial awareness thing, but there are some cues you can take. However, you need to ask if you are going to change your pictures: some people may prefer to change out their pictures seasonally, or if they just find a new picture that they want to replace an old one with. As such, you need to take that into consideration if you’re going to install it somewhere above a tall entertainment station or anywhere near a ceiling in general
- Thankfully with Levitate Hanger, this makes that process much easier to deal with. Our product requires no bolting down for installation, and can easily be removed from your wall without causing any damage to it. So you can attach and reattach as much as you want!
These and everything else we will mention in this blog post are vital things you need to keep in mind while hanging your pictures. There are plenty of other tiny factors that go into the room, but there are also plenty of things you should know about your photos themselves.
Get A Visual on The Photos
Hanging photos involves knowing what photos you are going to hang. Therefore, it is probably best to factor in things about them similarly to how you would factor in the room itself. Many of the important aspects of the interior itself translate over to the photos and artwork
Some of the important things to keep in mind, along with how Levitate Hanger makes those points much easier to handle, are:
- How large the photo or artwork is: space is limited on every wall. Therefore, you wouldn’t want to take up too much of it. Therefore, hanging something like a 10-foot tall canvas won’t work in a room that is barely that tall.
- Thankfully, where you would normally need to worry about hanging what would be a heavy painting afterward, Levitate Hanger makes this much easier: even your biggest pictures are supported, with our hangers being able to hold up to 20 pounds of weight
- How small the photo is: Similarly, you want to take into account that a single photo will only take up so much space. If you hang one 1 foot photo on a giant wall, it’s going to look awkward with all of that free negative space around - a concept we will touch upon later as well.
- And if you need picture hangers for photos of different sizes, you need not worry any longer: Levitate Hanger is a one-size-fits-all solution that will fit practically any photo and painting you can throw at it.
- The coloration of the photo frame: this treads upon color theory again but it is an important thing to consider: does your picture’s frame, not just the picture itself, compliment or contrast properly with the wall it will be hung upon? If your picture fits but the frame does not, try and get a different frame to fit better on the wall.
- The coloration of the artwork: the general primary color of any artwork you would hang on your wall will be the big complementary or contrasting color you will want to keep in mind. A painting featuring a vivid blue sky may not fit well with a neon green wall.
With these primary points established for you to help pick out the best places to hang your photos, and how our product can make some of these steps much easier to handle, let’s talk about 2 concepts that can help to further enhance your picture-hanging choices.
Understand Color Theory and Negative Space
Color theory is something very hard to properly define but is generally broken down into three different categories, all defined by colormatters*.:
- The Color Wheel: this can be broken down to something as basic as “A color circle, based on red, yellow and blue”. What this essentially means is that you will have your primary colors adjacent and opposite to one another, which is usually broken further down into secondary and tertiary colors. Above should be an example of a color wheel that you can use to find
- Color Harmony: colormatters defines harmony as “a pleasing arrangement of parts, whether it be music, poetry, color, or even an ice cream sundae.” This essentially means that you need to make the coloring of your wall and frame achieve a figurative harmony, where the colors are not too dull but not too busy. To quote them once more, “extreme unity leads to under-stimulation, extreme complexity leads to over-stimulation. Harmony is a dynamic equilibrium.”
- Color Context: colormatters describes this as “How color behaves in relation to other colors”. In essence, this is how color in the center of something contrasts with the color surrounding it. For example, black contrasts against red, making it pop out, while white makes red not stand out as much.
These concepts are very valuable to know when choosing which pictures and which picture frames to hang on your wall, so make sure you keep all these in mind, along with our next concept: Negative space.
Negative space, as defined on CreativeBloq, is “the space between, within and surrounding an object in an image.”** This is an important concept in artwork but can be translated into decorating. What it will essentially mean for your wall is “how much wall do you want to show under the pictures you will hang?”. While it is totally possible to fill a wall to the brim and leave zero wall space peeking out from underneath, it will look cluttered and disorganized. At the same time, if you let too much of the wall show through, it may look empty and incomplete. As a result, it is strongly recommended to find a happy balance for yourself so that your wall looks neither cluttered or empty.
Both of these concepts can be broken if you put in a picture shelf or bang a nail into your wall, but with Levitate Hanger, you don’t need to worry about that: when you hang your photos with Levitate Hanger, it is designed to make your photos look like they are levitating. So no more worrying about if the photo shelf will match your wall: just stick the hanger to the back of your photo, stick the hanger to the wall, and levitate all of your photos like magic!
Now that you know some of the basic things you can do to easily pick the best place to hang photos, and how Levitate Hanger will make that process much easier, you should be able to start hanging with no issue. So preorder your Levitate Hangers today, and get Levitating!’
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* "Basic Color Theory - Color Matters." https://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.
** "Negative space: 24 brilliant examples | Creative Bloq." 20 May. 2019, https://www.creativebloq.com/art/art-negative-space-8133765. Accessed 9 Nov. 2019.