How to Honour Your Cultural Heritage with a Photo Canvas

We decorate for a variety of reasons. For one, it seems pretty primal – we have an instinct to mark our living space as our own and to make it visually appealing. For another, it’s enjoyable, and many people have discovered a heretofore unknown joy in changing their surroundings when they undertake a renovation. Finally, it demonstrates control over our lives: We may not be able to control everything, but we can certainly create a photo canvas and control what the walls in our home look like.

Design, then, may be in our blood. Often people assume design in their home has to be “artistic” in some sense – that it must follow opaque rules of colour matching and shapes and that the subjects we use on our walls must only relate to our “design”. Why not combine the essence of who you are in your room design? Bringing your cultural heritage and your family history into your design work can be a powerful decision – and it’s easier than you think. Here are a few quick ideas to inspire some looking back.

Photo Canvas Flags

While it may be too obvious for some, turning a flag that symbolises your ethnic and/or cultural heritage into an awesome print for your walls can be an incredibly powerful moment – and also incredibly artistic and beautiful. Flags aren’t just potent symbols of your ancestry or perhaps your early life, they’re also quite beautiful: They’re vibrant and colourful, have a distinct shape, and can pop off the walls as powerfully as any art.

If you can find good-quality images on the web, go for it. The web site www.flagart.com will sell you a high-quality image of your flag for a reasonable price as well.

Hometown Photos

A more subtle but equally powerful approach is to take a photo of your home town or birthplace and transform it into a photo canvas for your walls. The key here is the choice of photo – on the one hand you want to choose a well-composed and interesting photo that adds an element of art to the walls. On the other hand, you want it to be a familiar site for you, because you will be asked about it. Choosing an image from your home town that you’ve never actually seen will only be awkward.

Maps

Like flags, maps make for incredible art on your walls, whether current and accurate or historic and fanciful – or even simply made up, like a map from your favourite Fantasy novel. Maps also allow you to pick a moment in time – say, your birthday – and show the world as it was in your home region. Like flags, maps are often colourful, and lend themselves nicely to massive, huge installations on your walls that carry a lot of visual interest. The New York Public Library offers a lot of gorgeous map images from their collection, absolutely free.

Your personal history is a great way to personalise a space – all it takes is a little thought and an eye for a colourful, powerful image. When you’ve chosen yours, click here and we’d be happy to transform them into art for your walls that will make it very personal indeed.