How to Select the Right Light to Display a Painting

Investing your time to carefully decide the best lighting option for a painting can engender all the difference making a magnificent gallery. Irrespective of if it is used for a soft highlight or an elaborate display, the essentiality of making use of the proper light is to put your painting at the center stage.

Making use of the proper light option makes your painting profoundly admirable for a long period of time. No matter how exquisite your painting looks, it becomes incidental without the existence of proper lighting. Shadows, glare, and uneven lighting can all affect how people view your painting. There are a few things to gather in order to select the right light to display a painting, and they are expounded below.

Lighting and Longevity: The pivotal concern in deciding the right lighting for a painting is determining the conditions that will best preserve the painting. However, aesthetic preferences is usually an incidental consideration. One must avoid aggressive lighting options because they usually engender light and heat damage, and this can even lead to permanent distortion of colors and brittleness. The tips below, if adhered to, can ensure the longevity of your painting:

  • Avoid direct sunlight: It is a rule of thumb that one should never let a painting be directly faced to sunlight. Infrared radiation and ultraviolet lights possess the means to cause fading.
  • Avoid direct light: Quite simply, you should not only avoid direct sunlight to your painting, but also avoid any type of light directly to your painting, to avoid heat damage.
  • Avoid fluorescent lighting: Do not make use of fluorescent lights for your painting because of its high level of ultraviolet energy emission. Fluorescent lighting escalates color fading and distortion of color.

Types of Lighting: The lighting precisely for your painting should be in such a way that it makes the painting three times brighter than the ambient light of the entire room. Using the proper ambiance or intensity can help to attain this. To be sure that the colors of your painting are accurately portrayed, seek out high CRI (Color Rendering Index) percentages for your lighting. Your painting will appear with vibrant colors as long as the CRI percentage is closer to 100%.

  • LED: LEDs boast of longevity and give off low ultraviolet heat and radiation. Arguably, LEDs are the best choice for you because of the above reason. They are also long-lasting and energy efficient.
  • Halogen: This type of light casts a cooler tone but generate intense heat. They should be kept at a safe distance from your painting.
  • Incandescent: This type of light casts a comforting warm glow, but the traditional type should be avoided because it displays too much warm light.

Lighting for Specific Mediums: Lights should be angled at 30 degrees to dwindle glare. Five degree should be added for bigger frames and five degrees subtracted to highlight textures. The way the angle of a light is adjusted usually has an effect on how the details of a painting with texture is illuminated.

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