Light is very important for paintings, it can make a painting look great or distort its’ true colors.

Lighting your paintingsactually is tricky. Artworks and light have a special connection. Aspiring artists who study to be painters are always taught the importance of light and shadow to create a realistic result.

How to light artwork on a wall?

There are a many ways to light up your canvas painting to highlight a beautiful piece of artwork in your home or office. Some choices for lighting art are fluorescent, halogen, incandescent, and natural lighting.

According to the painting’s colors, each one may be better than the other.

Natural light– Many people think that natural lighting is perfect for viewing artworks, however, the sunlight should be avoided at all costs. Natural sunlight contains UV rays that can destory paintings permanently. Natural light can make the colors in your artwork fade especially the medium is pastel or watercolour. Prints and photos are also affected by sunlight. Natural sunlight is also unpredictable and unstable. Based on the time of day and weather, sunlight can make painting look darker or lighter and even change the shade of the colors on a artwork.

Incandescent light – This kind of lighting for artwork has its pros and cons. It can bring out warm colors like red, orange, brown, pink, or yellow magnificently but is not perfect for cheap wall art depicting the seaside for example, which has many blues, violets, and greens. Cool colors will look flat and warm colors will be improved. If you are placing a canvas art with lots of warm colors on the wall, incandescent lights would be the best choice.

Halogen light– Museums usually don’t use halogen lights quite often since the bright white light it emits, but still many people find it is a good lighting option to highlight canvas paintings. It enhances the colors perfectly if low wattage bulbs are used. If you are going to use halogen bulbs to light your painting, select low wattage bulbs to reduce infrared or UV rays.

Fluorescent light – Fluorescent light is an artificial kind of light but it also emits large amounts of UV rays just like the sun. These sorts of lights also do not produce the right kind of spectrum of colors which will make your wall art look dull or discolored. Museums never use fluorescent lights. There are lots of experts suggest not to expose canvas art to any kind of lighting for too long, no matter natural or artificial lighting.  This is strongly advised for paintings on paper such as pastels, watercolors and photos printed on paper.