Cool Ways to Use the Split Canvas Print

Like the people who inhabit them, every room has its own distinct personality. Even if you don’t put some thought and effort into designing it, a room will slowly take on the personality of its owner: If you’re scattered and forgetful, the room will get messy and disorganised in an adorably ‘you’ kind of way. If you’re tidy and goal-oriented, the room will look like a museum exhibit about you.

In the same way, not all room decoration strategies are equal. While a big, impressive canvas print that really has a Wow! factor might work in some rooms, it doesn’t work in every room. And sometimes a bunch of disparate and disconnected prints scattered here and there don’t work, either. When you find yourself caught between the looming and impressive and the smaller and subtle, the ideal solution is sometimes to mix the two together with a split design.

The Split Canvas Print

The split is a simple concept: Instead of one huge piece, you divide your image or concept into several smaller pieces. Note the use of the word concept – your split doesn’t have to start off as one mega image that gets divided, puzzle-like, into several smaller pieces (though that is a powerful and attractive way to go). Your split concept can be much more subtle and artistic than that. The power of the split starts off with the combination of the best parts of large and small canvases: Big impact, flexible arrangements, awesome scale, intimate presentation.

Ideas for the Split

Split arrangements can be used effectively in a room in several ways:

• The Old Reliable is to take a big image – a panorama from your holiday, a family reunion photo with fifty people, a huge blow up of your baby or your wedding photo – and splitting it into several smaller pieces and installing them in a tight pattern. This works, it has real impact and fun factor, and there’s no reason not to go with this approach.
• Try using different angles and framing for the same subject – instead of a panorama, use the Split to show the same subject over and over from slightly different angles, or on different days, with different lighting, weather, and other details.
• Try using a clever combination of superficially unrelated things, like a puzzle – split a concept using a small canvas print for each aspect of it, like a puzzle. One example would be to spell out your child’s name using artistic images of things that start with each letter – an Apple for ‘A’, a Rainbow for ‘R’, etc.
• Another idea is to use a large canvas print in the centre and then have seemingly unrelated images radiating outward from it smaller prints, each one a comment on or call-back to the main central image.

The Split is a powerful design approach. All it needs is some creativity and a little patience, and you can easily elevate the style of any room to expert levels, just by playing with scale, division, and pattern. When you’ve come up with a really cool idea for your room, click here and we’d be delighted to create all the prints you need.