How to Hang Dog Art Without Making Your Home Look Like a Vet's Waiting Room

There is a line between a home with dog art in it and a home that has been decorated by a dog. Most people cross it without noticing, and it is almost never the artwork's fault. It is the framing, the height, and the quantity.

Buy the bigger size

The single most common mistake is scale. An 11 by 14 print looks generous held in two hands and looks apologetic on a wall. As a rough rule, a print above furniture should span somewhere between half and two thirds the width of the piece below it. Over a console or a sideboard, that is usually 18 by 24. Over a bed, larger still or hung as a pair.

If you are between sizes, size up. Nobody has ever stood in a room and thought the art was too big.

Frame it in wood, not metal

Natural oak, ash or a warm unfinished timber in a thin profile. Black metal frames make everything look like a gallery gift shop, and gold makes an illustration look like it is trying to be more expensive than it is.

A generous white mat — five to eight centimetres — does more for a print than any frame upgrade. It gives the image room to be looked at. Without it, the paper edge and the frame edge fight.

Our prints ship unframed for exactly this reason. The frame is a decision about your room, not about the artwork.

Hang it lower than you think

Centre the image at roughly 145 to 150 centimetres from the floor — eye level for most people standing. Almost everyone hangs art too high, usually because they are measuring from the ceiling or from the top of the sofa.

Above furniture, leave 15 to 25 centimetres between the top of the piece and the bottom of the frame. Any more and the art floats, unattached to anything.

Group in odd numbers, or in a strict grid

Three prints in a row at even spacing reads as considered. Two reads as a pair, which is fine above a bed. Four in a loose cluster reads as indecision.

If you are hanging several from the print series, keep the frames identical and the spacing tight — six to eight centimetres between frames. Variation in the frames plus variation in the images is one variable too many.

Put it where the dog is not the subject

Here is the part nobody says. Dog art works best in rooms where the dog is incidental — a kitchen, a hallway, a home office. Hung above the dog bed, next to the food bowls, beside a wall of dog photographs, it stops being art and becomes signage.

The still lifes in our series were drawn with this in mind. A mug, a matchbox, a jar. They read as objects first and as jokes second, which is what lets them live in a kitchen without announcing anything.

What the paper is doing

Giclée is not a marketing word, though it is used as one. It describes a specific process — pigment inks sprayed at very high resolution onto heavyweight art paper, the same method used for gallery editions. Pigment rather than dye means the print does not shift colour in daylight for decades. Matte art paper rather than photo paper means no glare, and a surface with some tooth to it that you can see from across a room.

It is the difference between something you frame and something you blu-tack.

Browse the print series — original illustrations, archival inks, three sizes, printed to order.