Botanical Prints: The Perfect Transition for Any

Color  You Want to Put on the Wall .

We’ve all been in that situation where we have just moved into a new place and blank walls are starring at us. So many decisions! Paint, wallpaper, borders, crown molding, wainscoting, or framed artwork…just to name a few. Recently, I was faced with that decision, and I turned to Art.com for assistance.

 Most of the walls in my new house needed to be made-over. The kitchen was an orangy-peach color and had a wallpaper border with cows on it that didn’t match any of my French-country antiques. One of the bedrooms had large purple and white diamonds painted on the walls. I wanted to add a soothing, pale yellow in the bedroom and a soft periwinkle accent wall in the kitchen. How could I transition to these new color schemes without them seeming random or forced?

After stumbling upon Art.com's floral section, I saw hundreds of beautiful floral prints. They had prints of everything from floral arrangements and bouquets to dried pressed flowers and wreaths. Bam! The perfect solution hit me. If I purchased a floral print for each room in question, I could use the assorted bold colors of the flowers in the print to tie together virtually any color scheme possible.

For my purple diamond bedroom, I repainted the walls in a sunny yet soothing pale yellow and chose a sunflower print to top off the new color scheme. The print really set the mood, so to speak, of the wall color and helped bring out the calming effect of the pale yellow. Because the sunflowers in the print are very bright, almost orange, they contrast well with my lighter yellow walls, ensuring that the walls are not found to be “too bright” for anyone.

In my cow-bordered kitchen, I found a print of a gorgeous bouquet of lavenders on Art.com.  It was the print of an aesthetically-appealing piece of artwork and it was great for a kitchen since lavender is also used in cooking, potpourri, that I absolutely fell in love with.  When I put my chosen steel blue/periwinkle on the wall, I thought, “Oh no! This is too blue, too dark!” I grabbed the lavender print and held it up to the wall--it made the whole wall transform. The wall color now popped, and the print looked brighter against it. The theme worked so well, I ended up getting a silk flower arrangement of lavender to go with it.

With the addition of just two well-chosen floral prints, I really made my  house take on an entirely new character. The colors I had wanted for the bedroom and kitchen did not seem random or forced with the addition of the floral prints. Now that I’ve been in the house for a few months, I am getting constant compliments on the accent wall that I once thought was overbearing, and I love showing guests my enchanting yellow bedroom.

By Staci Marquez-Nichols,