The “Family tree” wallpaper
The most popular wallpapers created are collages of family photographs, sometimes of a family occasion like weddings, birthdays, births and babies, or a holiday theme. The broader family – the Family Tree is the most popular. Visually tracing the great great grandparents up to the 2020’s new-borns makes a brilliant wall feature!
This makes a great Lockdown project and a fabulous Christmas present – sort your photos out and measure the wall that’s it! Well think about your design preferences and we will do the rest.
The above wallpaper might not mean alot to you but for the family and all their relations and friends it is wonderful – a focal and talking point. It might not be best for the main room, but the hallway or cloakroom it is spot on!
Collages do not come with a lot of rules, they can be as random as you want them to be, which gives you the freedom to use unrelated images if you choose. Photos can be mixed with paintings, black&white with colour, you can mix the Renaissance with Picasso and add in some some Ancient Greek – often it is the contrasts that make the collage.
Checkout the Examples page for ideas of what you can do.
Famous paintings
There is a trend of people making wallpapers from great works of art, why have one picture when you can have the whole wall scattered in a cacophony of classic art – literally worth 100’s of million of dollars (…if only they were original).
As many paintings were painted over 100 years ago they are now in the public domain and are not copyrighted. In recent years many organisations, galleries and museums have digitised copies of there art and made them available for download often in high resolution – Perfect for wallpapers!!
Below are some good sites, but you can always google phases such as ” works of art in the public domain “, “free art downloads” etc.
Wikipedia is good for Art, then there is Free-images , also Artic.edu and loads loads more.
Modern Art
Is a little more tricky in terms of possible copyright issues but at the same time there is so much more out there, it is more diverse and is being created as we speak. Yes Andy Warhol is still copyrighted but thousands of others are not and many artists want their work viewed and out there – “any publicity is good publicty” I believe is the saying.
Again search the internet try phases in Google such as “modern art in the public domain“.
Here are some good sites: Pexel/contemparty art, Pexel/painted faces , Unsplash , PublicDomainPictures , MOMA
As a general guide, copyright lasts for the life of the publisher plus another 70 years.
Public domain Photographs
Here is a starting point, 99Design directs you to resources
Other ideas for wallpaper/collages…..
“Ping” from Thailand is an artist and often makes charcoal drawings of super heroes, portraits, birds and animals – he donated us loads. The idea was to frame them and put a few on the wall one day – but never got round to it. Then it was suggested we scan them and make a wallpaper! Bingo, it was easy and we got to show them all, well not all of them as there are 100’s, but enough to fill our child’s bedroom wall.
If you have any ideas/questions about your project and would like to discuss please contact us at cats@selfiewallpaper.com
Some popular styles
If you want to respect the boundaries of the picture, without another image overlapping then you need to go Tiled – I saw a very nice wallpaper of classic artists – Van Gogh, Matisse, Rembrandt etc which was Tiled. To go Scattered it almost felt disrespectful for another picture to be overlapping these works of art. Although please note, in both Tiled and Scattered it does not mean the actual pictures themselves cannot be slightly cropped to help fill the dimensions of the wallpaper.
To emphasis a particular work of art it can always be made bigger or put centre stage (that means you need to rename the image files 1sw, 2sw etc – to let us know).
A favourite is Scattered, this is where the images can overlap and gives the collage more freedom, more randomness. Particular images can be bigger than another if required, the collage has a feeling of being more artistic.
A small black border rather than no border is popular, as is a black border rather than a white border. Shadows where possible are also a favorite touch.
A Grid is good when you want to give every picture equal importance – such as a school year book.