Decorating our homes with custom canvas prints or metal, glass, or acrylic photo prints is nothing new. But like every other technique in the world of interior design, the true power of it is in how you bring your own creative spin to it. Simply throwing metal prints or canvas prints of favourite photos can result in a happy but underwhelming room, because while your photos may be interesting, if they’re not taken specifically for the design they may not mesh 100% with everything else you’re doing.
If you choose to take some bespoke photos to send off for printing on canvas or other material, consider this: Busy backgrounds and photos with a lot of unnecessary detail are the most difficult to work into a design plan, because the sheer amount of information in them can be distracting, and ensuring that every piece of a complex composition works in the room is often impossible. That’s why, when it comes to bespoke photography for your design, it’s best to Go Minimal.
The Minimal Print on Canvas: Principles
Going Minimal doesn’t mean you eschew detail altogether – it means you control the details you include in your photo. You start off with a white background – a clean wall in the home, or perhaps a wall with a sheet stretched over it. Then, whatever your subject is or whatever your goal is for the room design, you slowly add those details. If your photos will be colour, you control the palette in the final version. If they will be black-and-white, you can control the shades and textures of everything in the photo to match up well with the overall design.
The main idea is control. You can consider and deliberate over every detail you allow into your photos, and thus into your room’s design.
The Minimal Portrait Photo Print
Portraits are often the most powerful use of a minimal approach. With a stark background and black-and-white effect there are no distractions in the background to take away from the faces and postures being captured. Whether it’s your family, a self-portrait, or simply interesting faces you’ve recruited, minimalism and portraiture go together perfectly.
While minimalism always starts off with a clean background in portraits, don’t assume that details are forbidden or even deprecated. Again, the idea is to control those details, not eliminate them. So if your portrait subject has a specific interest or personality quirk that works with your room’s design, add it in! This can be accomplished by adding details to the background, by what they’re wearing, or through other details that you can sprinkle in.
In the end, a minimal approach to photography can actually take more planning and work than a more expressive and less-controlled approach, but the increased control it grants over the final product makes it an ideal approach for interior design. When you’ve worked up the best possible minimalist photos for your room, click here and we’ll turn them into stunning metal, glass, or canvas prints that do exactly what you want them to in the room.
