Where & How To Find, Buy & Arrange Affordable Art
Where & How To Find, Buy & Arrange Affordable Art

Where & How To Find, Buy & Arrange Affordable Art

Choosing the right art for your home can be daunting – no matter your budget, the marketplace is vast, and it can be hard to find high quality, affordable work that suits your personal taste. Luckily, there’s a new online platform promising to do the hard work for you. Here, Artorial’s founders – interior designer Jo Sampson and fashion designer Jenny Crosbie – share their best sourcing, buying and hanging tips.
By Georgina Blaskey

Curate A Considered Collection

“Choosing art can be overwhelming for a lot of people. We all put a lot of time and energy into decorating – and we often have a clear direction when it comes to the colour and furnishings – but when it comes to that last push i.e. a cohesive art collection that pulls the space together, there’s a vast amount of choice out there. Often, you’ll find one piece of art that you love, then struggle to find something to complement it, and walls end up being left bare. That’s the problem Artorial aims to solve. With an exclusive range of artwork edited by aesthetic, it allows you to interchange various styles of prints to finish a space and bring a look together.”

Build Cohesive Displays

“While we were searching for contemporary artwork for our own interior projects, we found tracking down pieces that fitted our aesthetic and budget wasn’t as straightforward as we expected. Artorial, however, brings together a variety of artistic mediums – typography, sketches, mark-making, photography, collage – all of which work with each other in terms of colour, form, texture and proportion. There is no set aesthetic – it’s more a curation of ideas that build a certain narrative. It's about presenting a wide-ranging print collection that’s been specifically curated so you can see how they work together. It cuts out so much of the time, cost and stress.”

Stick To Affordable Pieces

“We’ve worked hard on our pricing because we want to make our art available to everyone. Our prices start at £30 for an A4 size print and go up to £80 for A1 size – it means you can get a statement piece of art for under £100. We’ve done this by designing, developing and printing all of our artwork in-house, so there are no middlemen. That then allows us to giclée print on high quality paper – which is bleach and acid free – more often used for more expensive art prints. While we don’t offer a framing service yet, we’ve thought about it. In the meantime, we produce all the artwork to standard sizes so it’s easier for customers to find the style of frame they need.”

With an EXCLUSIVE range of artwork edited by AESTHETIC, it allows you to interchange various styles of PRINTS to finish a space and bring a look together

Look For Unique Collaborations

“We’ve just launched our first World Of.. collection with the interior designer Laura Stephens. As print designers, it’s such an exciting opportunity to work with some of our favourite creatives by translating their 3D aesthetic and vision into new, individual 2D artworks. We start each project by putting together a moodboard. Then, we work with the designer to refine those ideas down, working across different mediums – sketching, mark-making, CAD, collage. It’s a rewarding and inspiring way to try new things, and it also makes the designer see their own work through a different lens. Laura’s point of view has injected a different aesthetic into the Artorial portfolio. 

“Another collaborative collection is our Artist in Residence project, which features work created and curated by artists from all over the UK. We loved the idea of creating a monochromatic collection which played with form, proportion, geometry, positive and negative space. To add interest, we experimented with different mediums – from paint, pen and pencil to collage and photography. It was important that each piece or set had a strong identity that could work on its own or as part of a gallery wall.”

Trust Your Gut

“We always want someone to have an emotional response to our work. Art doesn’t have to be intellectualised and stuffy – you can have a gut feeling and just like what you like. We have a lot of lifestyle imagery which shows our work in situ, which hopefully inspires our customers, too. We’re also introducing a service where you can email us a picture of your space and we can curate a selection of art in different themes to help guide you.”

Get Framing Right

“We’ve deliberately designed our work in standard sizes to fit off-the-shelf frames. Bespoke framing is expensive, and we wanted to make it as easy and accessible as possible. While framing isn’t available on the site as yet, we have pulled together regular frame edits of some of the best online retailers that we feel will work best with the prints.”

Inspired? Follow Jo & Jenny’s Step-By-Step Guide To Building A Gallery Wall...

Always define the need and requirements first. Assess the space you have and the emotional response you want to create. Do you need art to animate a wall, bring a hint of colour to it or balance it out other elements in a room? Answer these questions in your own mind before you start anything.

Define the sizes. Artwork set out in a formal grid can really add geometry to a space and keeps things clean – but if you’re after a more eclectic look, then gallery walls can be great. They can be themed by colour, pattern or you can mix the designs. You can also add some personal touches – like your children's artwork, concert tickets and family postcards. 

Create a focal point and work outwards. When hanging a gallery wall, it’s important to create a rhythm so pieces fit together like a jigsaw. It's useful to lay the art out on the floor or, alternatively, cut out paper templates and stick these to the wall to get an idea of composition and positioning.

Rely on frames to animate and add character. We love to paint frames in complementary or contrasting paint. Tester pots from all good paint companies are great for this as they’re inexpensive and can often match the interior directly. If you want to bring coherence and depth the the scheme, paint your frame two shades darker than the wall colour 

Browse Jo and Jenny’s Favourite Artworks…

DISCLAIMER: We endeavour to always credit the correct original source of every image we use. If you think a credit may be incorrect, please contact us at info@sheerluxe.com.

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