Deprived of external stimuli to bolster your creativity flow? Has being quarantined within the constraints of your apartment walls muddled your motivation? Consider revamping your bedroom walls with touches of your style and artistic taste. Decorate your space with an intricacy that counteracts the boredom many of us may experience during this period of self-isolation. These aesthetic spices can allay the humdrum of solitary life.

More than the mere act of arranging items, redecorating your room is an expansive hands-on process. While I will detail some blueprints to help you pinpoint your inspiration route, the direction is yours: feel free to tweak them, or design an exotic ambiance from scratch, according to your visual instincts.

Before we get started, here’s a reminder to open your window to absorb some fresh air—a natural energy boost.

Theme up a wall through a montage of art prints.

Imagine the overall aesthetic, including the color scheme, patterns, and mood. Would you want a vintage vibe of dark, faded neutrals, or a burst of vibrancy through youthful neon colors? Perhaps you refuse to let your wall be confined by one specific atmosphere and would rather have it bridge multiple moods and time periods, or you settled on a minimalist backdrop but would like to accent it with some intricately patterned Bohemian-style art. If you’re not sure what particular aesthetic speaks to you yet, you can discover it in the process, by gradually filling in the details and rearranging materials to determine what is the most personally appealing. When it comes to stylizing your wall, the boundaries are malleable. Here are some sources you can utilize to help you get started with compiling the details, along with some personal example portraying how I discovered and adopted these tactics:

Magazines and newspapers. Flip through pages in search for art or images that would make compelling additions to your wall. Then, simply cut them out and tape them up. Because they may differ in length, width, and orientation, this allows for freedom to dabble and create clusters of art that accumulate into various shapes.
Dig through your home items to find ones you can make decorative use of, whether they have an intrinsic aesthetic function or not. For instance, you can paint a shoebox cover, or hang a handmade bracelet you rarely wear, thereby diversifying the texture on your wall. The idea here is to think of unconventional ways you can utilize otherwise mundane objects in the service of beauty.
Etsy, Pinterest, etc. You can use photos and art prints you find online as creative inspiration, or as direct contributions to your wall collection, by purchasing prints from artists or printing designs out if you choose to save a few dollars. Perhaps, after collecting a diversity of magazine pages and household objects, you’re striving for a more cohesive composition. The manifold of art you can find on these websites comes in handy, ensuring that you’ll find a number of works unique yet consistent with the particular vibe you are searching for.
Create your own art, and thereby transform your room into a personal museum. This goes without say, but every artist, including room designers, deserves a reminder of their artistic potential. Imagine waking up to the sight of your own creations steadily situated against your wall. These could be the motivational seeds exhibiting a positive feedback loop that breeds more creative energies.

2. Create a textual/textural wall: cover it with poetry, music sheets, newspapers, etc.

2a. A neutral-toned antique wall

Got a hoard of newspapers lying around your house untouched for years? Instead of throwing it away, save that paper and recycle that environmental resource for a free recreating opportunity. A similar antique effect can be achieved using pages from old books or music sheets.

Bonus: you may also spice up the layout by splattering paint onto these pages, or by stroking them using ink, pastels, or charcoal. Colors of black, white, and grey may enhance the antique atmosphere, while colors in the rainbow spectrum would form a contrast by fashioning a rather vibrant, modern atmosphere in the foreground. If you don’t have the necessary materials for these embellishments, dried or fake plants make another option, acting potentially as a buffer between older decades and modern days.

2b. A rainbow wall for creative writing

As someone who harbors a deep fascination with poetry, I find it helpful to have a wide array of my favorite poems displayed in convenient sight, which I can revisit just by walking through my narrow corridor, without having to reach into my cabinet or scan my bookshelf for a particular poetry book or that Course Reader from my Poetry and the Human class.

Hand-copying your favorite poetic lines or song lyrics transmits a calming, therapeutic energy that allows you to immerse yourself in these evocative channels in a synesthetic way, hearing the vocals and background acoustics or the poet’s rhythmic speech as you transcribe the words. It can also be an opportunity to practice your calligraphy, if you gravitate towards quotations or excerpted lines in larger, script-like fonts.

Perhaps you find handwriting rather time consuming and would rather undergo a more efficient route of creation, or you’re yearning for a different aesthetic in which it may not be the most compatible mechanism. You may experiment with printing on colored paper, which would save up chunks of time if you’re more interested in displaying short stories, and may be more practical if you’re imagining, from a perfectionist perspective, a digital font that is rather difficult to replicate by hand.

3. Reorganize your closet by color.

A visually therapeutic task, the process emptying and restocking your closet by color provides a clearer headspace while allowing you to interact with the different hues that your clothes offer. Not only is it stress relieving for the moment, it also saves you the time and accompanying frazzle should you haul through an otherwise haphazard arrangement of clothing. The more clothes lined up, the tedious the search. Instead, with a color-coordinated closet, you can find that apricot-colored, silk thrift jacket with just a glance.

Loving the organized, rainbow appearance? You can do the same with your bookshelf. Feel free to diversify your arrangement tactics by playing around with the orientation of your books and by supplementing your shelf with plants, picture frames, sculptures, and artifacts.

4. Enhance the aroma by using an oil diffuser and essential oils.

Let’s switch gears for a minute from sight to smell. Essential oils come in a myriad of scented flavors, including frankincense, sweet orange, and lemongrass, each with its own aromatherapy benefits. While frankincense produces a particular calming effect conducive for meditation, sweet orange induces the uplifting, freshening effect that you may desire after remaining within the confines of the familiar indoors. One commonality that all these flavors share is the ability to add romantic ambiance and luxury whether you’re making your bed or sitting down for a meal.

Old school candles are another means to achieving these aromatic effects, perhaps providing stronger scents. Yet, I chose oil diffusers because they are less toxic, more long-lasting, and are comprised of natural compounds extracted from plants. In addition, you have the privilege of making your own essential oils at home.

While decorating a blank wall or rearranging an entire closet may be time consuming, the effects of essential oils can be achieved within a minute. Pour in a few droplets of the oil followed by water, plug in the oil diffuser into the socket, turn it on, and voila! You can relish in that citrusy or lemon-like fragrance as it diffuses into the atmosphere.

5. Use LED string lights (in combination with tapestries or accessories).

Apart from consuming less energy than traditional incandescent light bulbs, LED lights offer a dim yet dramatically captivating effect—especially when used without supplementary light sources—one that helps sustain focus within your creative zone. The length affords you a wide range of staging possibilities, whether you intend to create a zigzag-shaped photo wall, outline the edges of your ceiling, or hang them freely across different sides of the room. Colored string lights, in particular, come with a remote control that allows you to switch up the personality of your room through a simple tweak in color and a button press. In combination with tapestries or other artistic designs, they engender a mesmerizing, otherworldly aura detached from the realistic familiarity in your abode.

While clipping photos to string lights is a popular design, feel free to get extra creative and unconventional by forming hearts, wreaths, or words and by wrapping them around with hanging leaves or paper petals.