You may be wondering if you should incorporate display lighting into your trophy room design. Yes, you should—but you shouldn’t necessarily use regular lights. Using art lighting, however, the right trophy room design team can transform a part of your home into a magnificent space to show off your mounts. Let’s learn about the proper type of lighting for taxidermy mounts.
There’s a reason for art lighting
The best way to highlight the taxidermy mounts and dioramas in your home trophy room is to install the right kind of lighting: art lighting. Trophy room lights are similar to lighting used in museums and art galleries to light paintings, photographs, sculptures and other forms of art. And like museum art pieces, preserved wildlife, like trophy mounts, requires a careful blend of light and shadow to appear realistic. Why is that? Well, wild animals live outside where sunlight gets blocked out by clouds, trees, rocks and mountains and burrows, and even safari animals on open plains are surrounded by the shadows of other animals.
Choose the right type of lighting
Your trophy room does not have the natural features of the wild. As a result, those shadows will not be there to pair with your trophy mounts. It’s up to the company you hire for trophy room design to suggest the best lighting for the job, which will not be typical home lighting. Regular lighting we use inside our homes will work against taxidermy mounts by illuminating the animals’ forms too much from all directions and angles. This makes them look artificial or scary, which defeats the purpose of creating animal mounts for your trophy room.
Shines a light on beauty and action
If you choose to use art lighting fixtures, consider hiring a professional trophy room design service to pick out, install and position them to ensure that your trophy mounts and accessories look natural. The pros will move the lights and position them just right, casting shadows all around the animals’ bodies to accentuate fur color, muscle tone, claws, paws, teeth and eyes. The better the art lighting, the more lifelike and vibrant your trophy room mounts will be.
The presence of light and shadow also creates a sense of action. If your mounts are set up as if they were still in the wild, then it looks something like predator pursuing prey, or herd animals grouped together. Other action scenes include animals playing together, eating and drinking together and grooming.
Other considerations
Working with lights is a part of the creative process, but you must also get creative with hiding lighting fixtures. Concealing trophy room lighting fixtures is important—especially since visible equipment can spoil the illusion of natural sunlight. Luckily, a skilled trophy room design company will be able to do this for you, from recommending small fixtures that go in the ceiling to providing backlighting for larger mounts or scenes.
Here at Nature’s Design Taxidermy, we can help with mounting, hanging, lighting suggestions and trophy room design. Call us with questions or to arrange a consultation!