Colour
Earthy wall art, defined properly.
“Earthy” gets used for anything beige. It means something narrower and more useful than that: colours that could plausibly have come out of soil, plant or clay.
The shades on this page, with their hex values — useful if you are matching paint or searching elsewhere.
The test for an earthy colour
Ask whether the colour exists as a pigment you could dig up or boil out of a plant. Ochre, umber, sienna, indigo, madder and olive all pass. Fluorescent anything fails, and so does any colour that only exists because of modern chemistry. This is not romanticism — it is why the palette hangs together. Natural pigments share a dullness that synthetic colours do not, and that shared dullness is what makes six of them sit in one picture without fighting.
Warm neutrals do most of the work
In almost every earthy print that works, cream and sand occupy more of the surface than the accents do. The clay and the ochre are the punctuation. Reverse that ratio and the picture stops reading as earthy and starts reading as a hot mess of oranges.
What it sits with, and what kills it
Unfinished timber, rattan, linen, unglazed ceramic, brass, jute. The material palette matters more here than in any other colour scheme, because earthy art in a room of gloss white and chrome looks like it was delivered to the wrong address.
What kills it: cool grey. Grey with blue in it drains the warmth out of every earth colour next to it and makes clay look like dried mud. If the room has cool grey you cannot change, go beige or neutral instead.
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.