Setting the Mood: How to Pick Bedroom Wall Art

Your bedroom is your private oasis. A place to relax, unwind, and enjoy the finer things in the night. That’s why – when redecorating a bedroom – picking the decor & color schemes are equally important parts of creating your personal oasis.

Whether you want your bedroom to feel calm, comforting, or serene or want to infuse a bit more of a playful or sensual vibe, the right colors, decor accents, and the right bedroom wall art can make all the difference.

Bedroom wall decor plays a critical role in establishing or maintaining the overall mood in the bedroom, which is why it’s important to think about what you are about to hang on the wall before pulling out the hammer and nails.  

The process of picking art for the bedroom is very different than the process that you would normally follow for picking art in any other room in the house, for obvious reasons.

For one, the way we use a bedroom is quite different from how we tend to use a living room, den, kitchen, or a home office. Bedrooms – as the name implies – are all centered around activities that happen in and around the bed.

Sleep being the #1 activity that happens in the bedroom, but it is not alone. Without going into details, suffice it to say that the things one does in a bedroom are rarely the same as the things one does in the kitchen. Rarely.

Picking the right bedroom art helps reinforce the overall mood that you want to set for that space. Whether that be the relaxing retreat that you can escape to after a long, hard day, the passion-filled loved nest normally reserved for honeymooners, or the quaint and playful innocence of a child’s bedroom. And we won’t even touch on the issues of art for a teen’s bedroom, because there really is very little hope there.

That being said, in most cases art should be selected with the idea of being aesthetically pleasing while also helping to ease the mind into a restful state. That is why big, bold, engaging artworks may not always be right for the bedroom.

But it does depend. It always depends.

That’s why no hard and fast set of rules can every apply, to practically anything decor related. Because it always depends.

Setting the Right Mood with Bedroom Wall Art

The color, size, style, and style of the bedroom art you select directly correlates to the mood you want to set in that space.

Bedroom decor most often centers around 1 of 3 key themes:

Tranquility

Using your bedroom as a serene oasis requires careful thought about the colors, bedroom art, linens, and other decor accents.

Traditional art choices for a tranquil bedroom include landscapes, garden scenes, botanical images, and ocean views. But simple graphic art pieces work as well. These types of images convey a sense of peace and calm that is often desired in a space dedicated to taking a pause to sleep and relax.  

Passion

Creating a sense of passion in the bedroom can be assisted by installing the right piece of artwork. Things with deep, rich reds, or erotic (but not raunchy) portraits can help create the right mood for the lovers’ bedroom.

It’s important to stay classy, especially if your bedroom is visible to guests making a quick trip to the bathroom. But it’s easier to take more aesthetic risks in order to achieve a particular mood in the privacy of your own bedroom.

Playfulness

Although most often associated with children’s bedrooms, a playful feeling in a bedroom usually centers around cute, fun colors and characters that remind us of the innocence of youth.

A joyful expression of color and imagery, these spaces are a bit livelier than your traditional bedroom, but can be very pleasantly put together.

Escape

Similar in concept, but with slight variations, the concept of Escape in the bedroom is to make the space a very different “world” where you can get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Bedroom wall art in an escape-centric theme often includes scenic photography, landscape paintings, or abstract art that has a distinct perspective of getting away from it all.

Whatever mood you are trying to convey, make sure you pick the right piece of bedroom wall art to convey that mood, and avoid things that contradict that mood… no matter how cool you may think they are.  

For example, whatever your decor mood, you probably want to avoid selecting pieces of Medieval art that feature particularly bloody acts of violence, as it may not set the right mood in a bedroom. The same would apply – in less extreme ways – to extremely bold and dramatic abstract pieces that are created with the intention of making the viewer think about what they’re looking at.

These guidelines get even blurrier when a bedroom serves multiple purposes. For example, a bedroom that also serves as a home office will need a slightly different mood that translates from day to night.

In the end, decide what mood you want to set in your bedroom and use that as a guide to help you pick bedroom wall art that helps tell that story.  

Bedroom Art Colors

A recent article on the psychology of color in the bedroom showed how the color you select for your bedroom can have a direct impact on the overall feel and mood of the room. This also applies to bedroom wall art.