what do you have on your walls?

[babyOcho]

Our walls are bare, our house is decorated and we've been living here for 9 years and need things on the wall, but need really need some inspiration.

Ideas please!

Pictures are always a good start. No flying ducks

Ours are more bare than I would like too. We DO have:
front room - a framed picture of lots of books;
back room - Breakfast At Tiffany's and a framed cross-stitch of a poem (made by my mum);
kitchen - an ABC chart and an old advertising sign;
stairs - a pre-Raphaelite print;
downstairs loo - a Jane Austen type pic.

I would like a huge Penguin Pride And Prejudice pic for the kitchen and something else bookish for the lounge. Also I quite fancy an optician's chart.

Oh we have a couple of film and theatre pics in the kitchen too (small).

We've got loads of photo canvases - I'm not too keen on pictures in frames because they need too much dusting! The canvases are all black and white (any photo looks good in B&W!) and they look very modern - and because there's no frames I know they'll always match in with whatever furniture or colours we choose (and they never need to be cleaned!). We've got a mixture of pictures - some from our wedding, some of the dogs, some of places we've been on holiday and some we just found online and liked the look of, but the B&W ties them all together. We tend to go for more informal shots or ones from a distance, rather than posed cheesy-smile ones, so the look good as 'art' in their own right rather than just being our holiday snaps or whatever. My favourite is one I took while we were walking the dog on the beach a couple of years ago - it's a panoramic shot with the beach stretching out into the distance and the sea looking very moody and dramatic, but I like it because I was actually taking a picture of our dog swimming at the time. Nobody else would probably even notice her in the water, but it always makes me smile when I look at it!

Paintings and prints mostly. In our sitting room, we've got 1 big oil painting by a contemporary Scottish-Pakistani artist over the fireplace, three smaller screen prints, also by contemporary artists, a Chagall print on loan from a friend, and a ceramic tile. We've also got a few of the better photos from our holidays printed and framed around the house. Upstairs, we've got more contemporary prints and holiday photos, plus various paintings that my parents have passed on, not necessarily to my taste but they fill the walls!

I tend to buy paintings I like, and sometimes give them to DH for Christmas etc, so we're filling the house up slowly.

Loads and loads of antique oil paintings. They are dead cheap on eBay - I just bought a large, gold-framed, portrait of a ship's captain dated 1820 for 230 quid.

I am sure that's not much more than my brother spends on crappy so-called modern art from Ikea.

Oil paintings must be out of fashion at the moment.

Mid-century Japanese woodblock prints also very cheap but utterly lovely.

Honestly, just get browsing on eBay - it's a goldmine.

Wow, lots of ideas.

MrsL - I looked into getting some of photos onto canvas, but it said the quality wasnt good enough (they were old photos). I wonder if B&W would be better.

Japanese woodblock prints sound lovely too.
Off to ebay....

We have 2 canvases in living room form local shop.

2 framed photos that dh took in dining room.

Framed photo by dh at top of stairs.

Unhung collage/mosaic thing that dh did - do you sense a theme here

Various photos along a landing wall upstairs.
(not all by dh!!)

We got all of ours from Crystal Canvas and they have a quality checker on the 3D viewer (and you can email them the image if you're not sure). You could always group 4 smaller square ones together if the quality isn't good enough for a large one. They do a lot of canvases on BOGOF, so it doesn't work out too expensive. Even if the quality isn't great it might not look too bad once it's actually on the canvas, as it'd be viewed from further away (even super-sharp photos look a bit grainy if you're right up close, because they're printed on cotton).

Mirrors! We have loads of mirrors, must be 'cos we're so vain but seriously, they go with everything, and they have the added bonus of bouncing lots of light around and making rooms look bigger.

For proper paintings, check out your local auction room, they often have loads of proper oil paintings/watercolours very cheap, and you get to see before you buy.

We also have a huge piece of textile from India which I've had framed in a "sandwich" of acrylic. Bit different to a picture and I love it. But it was admittedly a nightmare to get framed.

i second minipie we have 5 Vintage mirrors in the kitchen diner they look fab and the light is lovely 2 sunsets what more could you want[ smile]

We have original paintings. Two are DH's from before we met, one we bought on honeymoon and one on another holiday. We also have a watercolour by a local artist.

Well worth looking around for local art groups- they nearly always have periodic exhibitions and are always good value.

We have an assortment of things - some cheapy prints of land/sea scapes, original pen and ink drawings, woodcuts (my faves, and I would like more than the 10 I have), an engraving of a duck, some original water colours of my home town, and some metal art.

DS also has a Hungry Caterpillar wall hanging that my mum stitched for him

In the living room I've got a huge mirror on the chimney wall. a painting by my late auntie (she was a very good artist), a plate that used to belong to my great grandma and a clock. I have a painting waiting to go back up that my sister did - brilliant one, sort of arabic? turkish? woman's head in foreground and bare bellied torso of another woman in the background. And a hand with a string of beads in the foreground that the woman is looking at. It's lovely. And another one waiting to be framed is one of maasai warriors in a group, jumping.

In the hall I've got a frame and in it are 4 little pics, 2 of ds1 and 2 of ds2, when they were toddlers. Also a painting of an old stone cottage, and a wicker bowl type thing with an african scene on it.

Up the stairs is another painting by my sister - a pint of guiness next to a glass of guiness with a red eyed frog in it

Then in the bedroom is a canvas picture of ds2 that we got when he won 2nd place in a beautiful baby competition (for entering him! )

and in the bathroom is a horrible but much loved mirror that belonged to my great grandma.

In the boys room are posters of ben 10, gogos and gormiti

And I've got other pics by my sister waiting for framing too! Including a wonderful red sunset that is on 3 canvases that you hang side by side.

I MUST get round to having these things framed.

pint of guiness - I mean a can of guiness next to a pint of guiness with a drunken frog in it

And I spelled guinness wrong!

kitchen - whole wall covered in ds1's works of art

sitting room - pictures of the dcs (not those huge Venture style ones, in my defence), barometer (because we're obsessed with the weather), huge mirror, 3 pictures of aircraft (nicer than they sound, sort of connected to dh's job).

hall - hideous picture of dogs that MIL gave me and I feel obliged to display

stairs - posters from exhibitions and musuems we went to in the carefree days before the dcs came along; photos from places we've been to.

our bedroom - photos of various sights in Germany; 3 botanical drawings

bathrooms - nothing

dcs's room - more aircraft pictures and a huge playmobil knights poster

spare room - nothing

Kitchen - nothing, too small! Well, apart from a nice calendar with pics of French art nouveau ads

Dining room - lovely painting of Scottish landscape with tiny cottage and lots of trees and mountains, done by my mother's great uncle

Sitting room - contemporary print, hard to describe but lots of words and mainly pale duck egg blue (contrasts with the general raspberry coloured feel of the rest of it). Also two cheapie Giorgio Morandi prints in very plain wooden frames, large mirror over fireplace with lovely chunky wooden frame made of old railway sleepers

Hall - DD's artwork held up by magnets so it can be changed around easily

Our bedroom - mishmash of stuff done by friends, large mirror over fireplace

DD's bedroom and the spare room are a bit up in the air at the moment as we are swapping them over so she can have a larger room, but I have a mad painted mirror (sort of 50s and mainly purple) for her new room and her current room just has stencilled letters round the top of the walls.

The bathroom just has two painted mirrors, one sort of art nouveau (only it is actually modern) and one old with painted flowers and leaves

Cobwebs.