Using LED Lights To Showcase Artwork

Whether it’s a painting that you’ve bought, or artwork that you’ve crafted yourself, picking the right light to highlight it is an art in itself. You want something that will illuminate the intricacies, but there are a lot of things to be wary of too.

We’re going to discuss the 4 main points to consider when lighting your artwork.

Brightness

One of the more obvious aspects to consider is the brightness of your light. It needs to be sufficiently bright in order to highlight the beauty of any given piece of artwork.

Finding the balance is tricky though – too much light and it’ll appear washed out, not enough and you won’t be able to see it.

It is generally accepted that the light on your painting should be 3 times brighter than the general ambience of the room.

Let’s apply this to an example. If the general ambience of your living room where your artwork is hung is 1200 lumens, then the optimal solution would be to use a spotlight with 3600 lumens of light.

Fixture

Ordinary, ceiling mounting lights might be easy and practical, but don’t give you the best results when illuminating artwork. What you should be looking at are directional fixtures like downlights.

This allows you to direct the light in a particular direction, with narrow beam angle products providing the best looking finish.

You’ll typically want a light that has a beam angle between 60^o and 90^o.

Colour Accuracy

The quality of a light bulb can be determined by its colour rendering index (CRI). This is an indication of how accurate colours appear when viewed beneath the light. The higher the value – the more accurate the colours.

As an example, fluorescent light bulbs typically have a quite low CRI. Colours viewed underneath this light appear lifeless and dull. This is why most art galleries use halogen bulbs – they have very high CRIs.

More and more galleries though are replacing their halogens with LEDs – due to their longer lifespan and lower running costs.

LEDs are up to 90% more energy efficient than their halogen counterparts, and they also last 20 times longer than incandescent lights. Most LEDs will last you up to 50,000 hours.

That’s over 17 years if you’re using them for an average of 8 hours per day!

LED lights also have quite high CRIs, generally 80 or higher.

If you don’t believe us, read all about how LEDs are now being used to illuminate the Louvre and the Mona Lisa.

Infrared And Ultraviolet Radiation

Traditional incandescent bulbs emit infrared radiation and ultraviolet light. Unless filtered, this will cause your paintings to fade, and potentially ruining it in the process.

LED bulbs emit neither of these, and help keep your artwork in perfect condition.

We would really recommend our 9W Dimmable GU10 LED COB Bulb. It provides focused brightness of 860 lumens thanks to a 60^o beam angle. A choice of warm white (3000K) and cool white (6000K) is also available, and it’s low power too at just 9W of consumption.

All things considered, LEDs are the superior choice for highlighting your favourite pieces, whether you’re looking to light canvas paintings or watercolours.