If you’re planning to give a room or two in your home a whole new look, why not let your camera give you a helping hand? We've spoken on the blog about using a vision board to steer your photography projects and today we're explaining why adding photograph to your a mood board is a great way to map out your interior plans. Along with collecting images from magazines and samples of things like fabric, taking photographs of products, places and other things you’d like to incorporate into your interior design can really get those creative juices flowing.

How to make your mood board

There are lots of different digital boards online – such as Pinterest - that allow you to collect together images so that you can revisit them at a later date. You can also use computer software such as Apple Pages, Microsoft Publisher or Adobe InDesign to layer up looks and create a more realistic representation of your living space.

However, the best way to create a mood board that will give you a grasp on the look and feel of the room you want to decorate is by making a physical board and doing some school style cutting and sticking. It’s a very satisfying process and one that makes it easy to explore what does and does not work together before settling on different combinations of colours, fabrics, and other elements of your design. Here are some things you may need when putting together a mood board…

• A board of some kind – this could be card, a piece of MDF or even a canvas print adorned with a photograph of the room you’re decorating.
• Tools for cutting and sticking – scissors, a pen knife, a glue gun or glue stick, staples etc
• Your items for sticking - Images collected from magazines and brochures, fabric swatches, photographs of things of interest (colour combinations you’ve captured, prints, interiors examples you’ve seen out and about)

How to use your mood board

Remember, your aim is not to create a cardboard copy of your room to emulate but to explore combinations and ideas that work in order to make decisions like which colour scheme you will use or what kind of prints, patterns and furniture work in your space. If you have a beautiful photograph that's captured colours or a trend you love, why not use it as a central starting point for the whole piece?

Once you’re happy with your board, fix your items in place and hang it somewhere prominent in the room you plan to decorate. This way, you can get a clearer impression of how things would work in the room itself. From this point you can carry the ideas you like forward to the decorating stage or simply go back to your mood board and make a few alterations before repeating the hanging process.

When it comes to decorating you can keep your mood board on hand to ensure you don’t make any purchases that aren’t in keeping with the overall look and theme of the room. As a finishing touch you could keep your mood board in a corner of your room as a point of interest or take a photograph and transfer it to canvas as a quirky piece of artwork.

Have you used your own photographs as inspiration for decorating ideas before? We’d love to hear about the concept and how the project turned out, leave us a comment below or head over to our Facebook page and say hello.