Highland Cow Wall Art

Highland Cow Wall Art

The first question people ask is how big the head needs to be, and the answer is bigger than you think. This is a portrait subject: the fringe, the horn curve and the wet nose are the whole appeal, and all three go vague when the animal is small in the frame. If the piece is going above a fireplace or a bed, treat the face as your unit of measurement and make sure it fills a good half of the composition. A distant cow in a field is a landscape with a cow in it, which is a quieter picture altogether.

Eyes are the second question, and the honest answer is that you often cannot see them. The fringe hides them in most images, and the good ones use that — the animal reads as calm and faintly comic rather than confrontational, which is why this works in a kitchen where a staring stag would not. Where the eyes are visible, check they are sharp. A soft eye in an otherwise crisp portrait gives away a weak original.

Backgrounds separate the strong examples from the filler. Plain white or soft grey lets the ginger coat and the horn silhouette do everything, and that version suits a modern kitchen, a hallway or a child bedroom. A moody hillside with rain coming in is a different proposition: warmer, more Scottish, better in a snug or a room with dark timber, and much harder to place next to anything patterned.

Colour is straightforward. The coat runs ginger through to near-black and sits well with sage, oatmeal, deep green and unpainted oak. It will fight a strong red, and it goes flat against orange-toned walls that repeat the same note.

Hang it at eye level rather than high on the wall. Animal portraits look wrong looming down at you, and the charm of this one is that it seems to be standing in the room with you, which only happens when its eye line is roughly level with yours.