Dogs Wall Art

Dogs Wall Art: Sizing It Properly

Size this by the head, not by the wall. A dog portrait works when the face is large enough for the eyes to read from where you normally stand, which means the head should fill a good part of the frame rather than sit in the middle of a field. Buy a small print of a full-body dog in a meadow and you get a brown shape: the animal you wanted to look at ends up too small to hold anyone's attention, and the picture stops working from the sofa.

Full-body and action images need the opposite treatment. A dog mid-leap, a running silhouette on sand, a pack of hounds: these are compositions built on movement and empty space, and they want width. Cropped tight they lose the very thing that makes them good, which is the room the animal has to move into.

Breed detail rewards a good original. Wiry coats, feathered ears and the fine hair around a muzzle are where quality shows itself, and they are also where a weak file turns to mush. If you are choosing between two similar images, look closely at the ear edge and the whiskers rather than the eyes — almost every photograph looks sharp at the eye, and only the good ones hold up at the fringe.

Illustrated and line-drawn dogs follow different rules. They keep working at almost any size because they are made of shapes rather than texture, they hang in sets without clashing, and they suit a hallway or a kitchen where a large photographic portrait would feel a little solemn.

Before you order, cut a piece of paper to the size you are considering and tape it up for a day. Dog portraits get hung too high far more often than too low, and in a room where people mostly sit, the eye line wants to be roughly level with theirs seated, not standing.