Snowmen Wall Art

Snowmen Wall Art

The first question everyone asks is whether it can stay up all year, and the honest answer is: some can, most cannot. A snowman with a scarf, a robin and a string of lights is unambiguously December, and hanging it in July looks like you forgot. A lone figure in a wide snowfield, treated as a winter landscape with a small human-made shape in it, will pass as a landscape in any month.

If you accept it as seasonal, that changes the sensible approach rather than ruling it out. Plenty of people keep one wall or one hook for whatever the season is, and swap through the year. A hallway, a porch, the wall by the stairs or the space above a hall table all take a seasonal rotation without disturbing the rest of the house.

Snow is mostly white, which is the technical difficulty with the subject. A weak snowman image is a white shape on a white ground with nothing to separate them. A strong one has cold blue shadow in the snow, a warm light source somewhere, or a dark treeline behind — something that gives the figure an edge. Check for shadow before anything else.

Warm rooms suit them better than cool ones, oddly. Against a cream or soft yellow wall, in a room with lamps rather than overheads, the cold palette becomes pleasant contrast. On a grey wall under a cool ceiling light, the whole thing looks bleak by four in the afternoon.

One practical tip if you do rotate seasonally: leave the fixing in the wall and hang the summer piece on the same hook. Repeated drilling in the same patch of plaster is how you end up with a crumbling hole in November, and the point of a swap is that it should take a minute.