Earth Tones Wall Art

Earth Tones Wall Art

Almost anything can hang beside earth tones without a fight, which is the main reason people buy them. Oak and walnut share their pigments. Black and white photography sits happily alongside, because the canvas supplies the warmth the photograph lacks. Linen, rattan, unglazed ceramic and brass all belong to the same family. The one neighbour that struggles is a strongly saturated cool colour — a cobalt abstract or a bright emerald print will make the ochres look muddy rather than rich.

Knowing what earth tones actually are helps with that. They are colours pulled towards brown and grey rather than towards white: terracotta instead of coral, olive instead of lime, sand instead of cream, rust instead of red. Because none of them shouts, the composition has to carry the piece, and weak examples in this palette collapse into a single beige field with nothing to look at from two metres away.

Contrast is therefore the thing to check. Hold the preview at arm's length and squint at it. If the shapes still separate, the piece will hold a wall. If it dissolves into one warm blur, it will read as a smudge above your sofa however pleasant the colours looked on screen.

Light shifts these tones more than it shifts brighter work. Warm evening lamplight pushes them further towards orange and can tip a room into amber monotone; cool north-facing daylight drains them slightly grey. Neither is a fault, but if the room already has warm walls and warm bulbs, choose a piece with some genuine cool or dark relief in it — a charcoal shadow, a bone white, a grey-green — to stop everything melting together.

A useful trick when placing them: hang earth tones on the wall you see from the doorway of a cooler, greyer room. They warm the whole space from a distance, so you get the benefit every time you walk in rather than only when you sit down.