Animals & Wildlife Wall Art

Animals & Wildlife Wall Art

Wildlife imagery earns its keep in a hallway, a study or up a stairwell — places people pass through and get a couple of seconds of eye contact with something alive. It works less well in a small bedroom, where an animal staring out from the facing wall stops feeling companionable somewhere around two in the morning. Dining rooms sit in between: a grazing herd is good company, a kill in progress is not.

Species choice matters more than most buyers expect. A stag, a wolf or a big cat carries obvious weight and will dominate whatever else is on that wall. Smaller subjects — a hare in long grass, a heron, a fox half-hidden in undergrowth — read as landscape with an animal in it, and they sit far more comfortably in a room you actually relax in. Decide which job you want done before you decide which animal you like.

Backgrounds separate a strong wildlife print from a flat one. Look for depth: some suggestion of habitat behind the subject, a hint of distance, light coming from a definite direction. Images set against an empty studio backdrop can look striking on a screen and oddly clinical on a wall, because there is nothing left for the eye to explore once the initial impact has worn off.

Fur, feather and hide are all texture, and texture is the thing canvas handles well. That is also why a busy patterned wallpaper behind an animal print tends to be a fight nobody wins. Plain walls in warm neutrals, or a deep muted green or blue, give the subject somewhere to sit.

Try this before committing: stand at the distance you will normally view it from — usually across a room, not two feet away — and ask whether you can still read the animal's eye. If the composition falls apart at that range, the piece is either too detailed for the wall you have in mind, or it needs to be larger than you were planning.