Parrot Wall Art

Parrot Wall Art

A perched parrot is a tall shape. Head, folded wing, long tail: the bird occupies a narrow vertical band, and cropping it into a wide frame leaves two large areas of background doing nothing at all. Upright formats suit single perched birds almost every time. Wide formats belong to the other version of this subject — birds in flight, a pair facing each other, a group strung along a branch — where the movement runs sideways and needs space to run into.

Tail length is the practical detail buyers forget. Long-tailed species need frame below the bird or the tail gets chopped, which looks like an accident rather than a decision. Check where the tail ends within the crop before you commit. A bird cut off at the tail reads as a mistake even to people who could not tell you why.

Colour is the reason anyone buys this subject and also the reason it goes wrong. Scarlet, cobalt and lime at full strength will dominate whatever hangs near them. On a white or pale grey wall that is fine, and often thrilling. In a room already carrying strong colour in the sofa or the rug, choose a piece with a dark background, which pushes the plumage forward and quietens everything around it.

Rooms with hard surfaces and a bit of humidity suit it, oddly well: a bathroom, a garden room, a kitchen wall. The subject is tropical and cheerful and holds up better in those spaces than in a formal sitting room, where it can start to look like a novelty.

One thing to inspect closely before ordering is the eye and the beak. A parrot has a ring of bare pale skin around the eye and a small hard pupil, and a good image renders both crisply. Weak examples blur that ring into the feathers, and the bird immediately looks dead behind the eyes, which no amount of colour elsewhere can fix.