Making Your Television Blend In

When we were still living in our first house, I came across the picture below (in Better Homes and Gardens magazine, I believe, although I cannot find it on their website now) and was inspired to create a gallery wall around our television to help it blend in.

I loved the black and white silhouette look so after mulling over some options, I decided that the furry kids would make great subjects.  While Seth used treats to coerce them into nice poses, I snapped some photos.  I enlarged the photos in Word and then printed them off in black and white.  I cut out their silhouettes and traced them onto black poster board.  I taped them onto white poster board and popped them into some black frames that I found at Wal-Mart.  Since we only have the three kiddos, I also decided to make a silhouette of the state of Tennessee (since Seth and I had both grown up here), a couple of small calla lily silhouettes (we had yellow ones at our wedding), and a hummingbird silhouette from a pic that I snapped during our honeymoon in Costa Rica.  This is the result.

I really liked how the silhouettes drew your eye upward and away from the ugly black box. Now I realize that I probably should have hung them a bit lower and closer to the television because they look pretty disconnected from it at this height.  

This past weekend, Seth got motivated to mount our television.  (It took some time and LOTS of furniture rearranging, but we have finally settled on a living room layout.)  I liked the idea of mounting the television just above the media console for a cleaner, more polished look.  I also knew that I wanted to use our silhouettes again to create a gallery around the TV.  Here is the before...

A big blank wall made the television stick out like a sore thumb.  (The cream door, crown molding, and plan wooden knobs on the weird storage cabinets are on our to do list.)  This time, I decided to leave the hummingbird out of the mix since multiple people could not tell what it was when they came over to our house in Illinois.  Here is what we came up with.

After hanging the kids, the lilies, and TN, there was a bare spot that needed a little something so I simply printed off a large K (in the font Optimus because I wanted something simple and clean-lined) and framed it.  

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out this time around.  I think hanging the silhouettes in a tighter group around the television created a much better result.  I'm still tweaking the top of the console and I'd like to replace the brown Ikea storage boxes one day.  I'm slowly learning that everything doesn't need to be perfect right away and that there is something to be said for letting a room evolve over time.  I'm not a patient person so this is a challenge for me.  

Our couch is finally being delivered today after a 9 1/2 week long wait.  I am super pumped.  I'll snap a picture to share with you later this week.  I hope I haven't built it up in my head too much during the wait.

How do you guys help make your television blend in?  Maybe you don't worry about it at all and prefer to let it be a focal point.  Maybe you have a nice armoire with doors that you shut when the television is not in use.