Seven Scandinavian Art Prints to Buy, by Independent Artists

A calm bedroom, a kitchen with company, a desk that needs a little less seriousness. The right print depends on the wall you're buying for. These are seven we'd hang from our own gallery, with a different reason for each.

This is a selection from the artists we work with, not a survey of every Scandinavian print you can buy. We've kept the choice small enough to compare: bold colour, quiet pattern, detailed drawing and a good visual joke.

If you're choosing for a particular room, start with the short note under each title. If you haven't settled on a style, our guide to choosing a Nordic art print works through colour, subject and viewing distance.

Swallow Dive, Helene Brox

For a calm bedroom or living room. Cobalt and cream; 50 x 70 cm.

Two colours, and that's the whole trick. Swallow Dive fills the frame edge to edge with diving birds in deep cobalt on warm cream, no horizon, no resting point. All the movement is carried by shape rather than colour, which is much the harder way to do it, and it's why the print reads clearly from across a room while staying calm enough to hang above a bed. If you're buying one piece from us and you want the safest choice that doesn't feel like one, this is it. 50 x 70 cm.

Eltsjoen, Ingunn Dybendal

For a reading corner or beside a desk. Detailed coloured-pencil landscape; 50 x 70 cm.

The opposite bet, and the reason it's here. Eltsjoen takes a Nordic lake landscape and redraws the whole thing as pattern: pink sky, dark mountain, a forest turned into folk motifs, water pooling in pale rings around a bridge. It's the most detailed piece in the gallery, worked stroke by stroke in coloured pencil, and it's the one print here that genuinely rewards the hundredth look. Which means hanging it where people sit rather than where they walk past. A reading corner, the wall beside a desk, anywhere you're close enough to keep finding things.

Trysilkaffe, Ingunn Dybendal

For a kitchen or dining wall. Colourful folk flowers; 50 x 70 cm.

Trysilkaffe is the most classically Scandinavian thing we sell, if classic means the folk tradition rather than the minimalist one. A green mug crammed with an impossible bouquet, daisies, rosettes and seed heads that never grew on the same plant, every bloom a different invention in red, purple and teal above a diamond-check cloth. It's rosemaling logic worked in coloured pencil, pattern first and botany second, and it does a job nothing else in the gallery does: it brings the whole folk-art shelf onto one wall. Where Eltsjoen turns a landscape into ornament, this does it to a table top, and the two hang together beautifully if you want the pair. 50 x 70 cm, and best somewhere with company, a kitchen or dining wall.

Mean Snothing, Simen Wahlqvist

For a home office. A dry visual joke in a square format; 50 x 50 cm.

Scandinavian design gets written up as serious, which misses the dry wit running underneath it. Mean Snothing is that wit in one image: an orange man with a Newton's cradle for eyes, one ball caught mid-swing, the face beneath it entirely deadpan. Physics happening on a forehead and nobody reacting. Wahlqvist draws with as few lines as he can get away with, and reckons a drawing's finished when it makes him laugh; this one clearly did. It's square, 50 x 50 cm, and it does more for a home office than any motivational poster ever has.

Morgenstrekk, Simen Wahlqvist

For a bedroom or a quieter workspace. Warm peach and ochre; 50 x 70 cm.

Two by the same hand needs justifying, so: Morgenstrekk is the gentle end of the same joke. A figure reaching for a small sun with a charging cable wound round him, the cable trailing down to a plug at the skirting board, as though he's unplugged himself from the night and is charging off the morning instead. Ochre on warm peach, drawn with the same handful of lines. Where Mean Snothing gets a laugh out of a guest, this is a print you can wake up to, and at 50 x 70 cm it scales to a wall the square illustrations can't.

Vinkveld, Sia Siamos

For a kitchen or dining room. A richly coloured wine-table scene; 50 x 70 cm.

Sia Siamos paints four table scenes for us, and Vinkveld is the best of them because it's the loosest. Wine evening, in Norwegian: a glass of red, green olives, dark grapes and vine tomatoes against checked tiles, the tiles dissolving into brushstrokes behind. The bottle in the foreground has its cork already adrift, which tells you where the evening's heading. The paint is thicker and moodier than in her other tables, and the print belongs on a kitchen or dining wall, near actual food and actual wine. If you'd rather have the same table earlier in the day, Morgenlevering is breakfast.

IThinkIThink, Helene Brox

For a pale living room or someone who loves bold colour. Pink, cobalt and green; 50 x 70 cm.

The loudest print we sell, and it earns its place for one reason: it's the one people react to out loud. IThinkIThink puts a cobalt head on shocking pink and spells its confession across it in green brush strokes, I think I think too much, with red squiggles looping through the profile like thoughts that won't settle and two wide mismatched eyes finishing the job. It isn't for a room that's already busy. It is the best gift in the gallery, for the person whose mind never sits down. Possibly you.

What isn't on the list

A shortlist can't cover every wall. Dragon is the most energetic thing Brox has drawn and wants a wall that can hold its nerve. Tree Top Peach is the quietest print we've got and will settle a bedroom without vanishing into it. Hyttefrokost is the sunniest of Siamos's tables and the easiest way into them. For a looser, playful still life, try Sunday Brunch by Gothenburg-based Hedvig Wallin: a blue breakfast cloth, green kitchen tiles and a table crowded with croissants, coffee and flowers. These are different answers to the same question: what would you like to live with? Have a look through the three categories whole and make them yourself: abstract, botanical and illustrations.

Sizes and framing

Six of these picks are 50 x 70 cm; Mean Snothing is 50 x 50 cm. Those are the print dimensions, so allow for the frame when you measure the wall. Each product page shows its current price and the available frame choices: wood, black or white, or an unframed print if you've already got a frame. Every print is made to order. Delivery costs appear at checkout.

If you know what you want but not what size, our guide to print sizes works through it room by room. If you know the wall but not the piece, eight ways to dress a wall is the practical version and The Art of Choosing Art is the long one. If you know the room but nothing else, the living room and bedroom collections are curated for exactly that. And if you'd rather just look, browse every print.