Colour
Beige wall art, and how to stop it disappearing into the wall.
Most Australian walls are a warm off-white, which means beige art is starting from roughly the same colour as the thing it is hanging on.
The shades on this page, with their hex values — useful if you are matching paint or searching elsewhere.
Beige, oat and greige
- Beige leans yellow. Warm, and the one most often on Australian walls.
- Oat is beige with more grey and a little more depth — the most useful of the three in art, because it separates from the wall.
- Greige is grey-beige and sits on the boundary. Against a warm wall it reads as cool; against a grey wall it reads as warm.
Getting separation from the wall
This is the whole problem, and there are three answers.
- Go darker inside the piece. A beige print that includes walnut or a deep brown has somewhere for the eye to go.
- Use the frame. A black or dark timber frame draws a hard edge around the work and does the separating for you.
- Use a wide mat. A generous off-white border makes the artwork read as an object on the wall rather than a patch of it.
What beige needs
One thing with contrast in the same room — a black frame, a dark timber piece of furniture, a charcoal cushion. Beige on beige on beige is calm for about a week and then reads as unfinished. The neutrals page goes further into the tonal-range problem, which is the same issue in a wider form.
Prints in this colour
From the Artsby collection, ranked by how close each palette sits to the shades above. Printed in Australia, delivery included.
Or match it to your actual room
Photograph the wall and the matcher reads the real colours out of it — then shows you prints in those, and lets you hang one on your own wall before you buy.