Ideally, everyone would start out furnishing their new home with the kind of art they want and then picking the remaining furnishings of their house to match. Sadly, this is not the case. You find that you need a couch and dining room table long before the idea of getting, or even affording, quality fine art enters your mind. This means that you need to find fine art to match your furniture instead of the other way around. It’s easier than you think it is.
Since you already probably have a decent furniture set for your living room, bedroom, dining room, etc., you won’t be interested in making an immediate upgrade. So you need your fine art to match your already existing furniture. You will find you either need to match a solid color or match a print of some kind in your furniture.
Matching a Solid Color in Furniture
Lots of people choose to go with some kind of neutral color, or at least solid color, for their couch and other large pieces of furniture. It’s generic and will go with a lot of different choices of home and things like tablecloths and curtains. Not surprisingly, this will also make finding the right fine art much easier for you to do. You simply need to find a piece of art (or more than one piece) which will either match or go with the color(s) already present.
If you happened to have chosen neutrals for your furniture, then you will have a few more options. You can pick something big, bold, and colorful without worrying whether or not the fine art will clash with the furniture. After all, neutrals are designed to go with almost anything. You can buy fine art which will bring color and interest into the room it’s displayed in.
Matching a Printed Pattern in Furniture
If you went with a pattern instead, finding matching fine art will be more difficult. Not only will you have to match the color scheme of your furniture, you will also have to make sure that the art and the fabric pattern don’t clash either. A big, bold, and colorful pattern will be the most difficult to match.
In order to make this fine art purchase work, you will need to put more effort into critically selecting the art. Make sure that the colors and the subject matter of the art will work with your furniture. This will be easier to do if you are looking at buying abstract art. Take the time to be properly satisfied your choice of art will add something positive to the space you want to display it in.
If you are trying to match a wood grain, it’s a subtle enough pattern that you can use the rules for matching a solid color in your furniture without any real problem at all.
How to Be Sure You’ve Chosen Well
Buying fine art is often an expensive purchase to make. I can’t blame you for wanting to get it right the first time. I would too. Fortunately, there’s a couple of options you can use to make sure that your art selection will work with your furniture.
Take Pictures of Your Furniture With You
The best option you have for making sure your fine art selection will match your furniture is to take pictures of the furniture you need to match and bring them with you. If you make sure that you have brightly lit the room when you take these pictures, then you will have an accurate color representation which you can bring on your phone to compare against different pieces of art for sale.
If you have a pattern to deal with, make sure that you also take a close-up shot of the pattern in that same bright light. You will want to see both the pattern up close and from a distance when shopping for fine art.
Take Fabric Swatches With You
This is a more traditional method of making sure that decor elements will work together. Get yourself a small piece of the fabric(s) you will need to match and take it with you while shopping for new fine art. Instead of relying on hope that the art will be lit up the same way as your furniture pictures, you can see your furniture fabric under the same lighting as the art. In some ways, this is a far more accurate method of matching fine art and furniture.
This method will likely mean that you will need to find an edge on your furniture’s fabric and trim some off. This might be easy or difficult to do depending on the condition of your furniture and how the furniture company finished off their product. Please don’t decide to chop a piece of fabric out of a major area just because you need a swatch. A photo will be much better if you don’t have access to a fabric edge.
Conclusion
Finding fine art to match your existing furniture is simply a matter of making sure that colors and patterns work together and don’t clash. If you take photos of the furniture to match, you will make what sounds like a monstrous task into something easy and painless. You will also have the satisfaction of decorating without the regret of poor planning.
