Ways To Decorate Your Dorm Room Using Lighting

Regardless of where you’re studying, dorm rooms are hardly the most welcoming and pleasant places to live in. A lot of people may not care much about this since dorms aren’t meant to be nice and comfortable to live in – you’re in the university to study not to live like royalty. However, studying is something that goes much easier and better when it’s done with the right attitude and in the right mood. And those two are things that are easily affected by our surroundings. So, it’s a very good idea to look for ways to decorate your dorm room using lighting.

Obviously, there are lots of dorm décor ideas you can go for aside from dorm room lights. Adding a bit of greenery is a great way to decorate your dorm as it is with any other work or study location. However, the dorm room décor can also be drastically affected by clever use of cool dorm lights as well. So, which are the general types of indoors residential lighting you can use?

Ambient lighting

This is what we call the general lighting of a room. Chandeliers, pendant lights, soffit lighting, and other such fixtures are what makes up the main source of non-natural lighting in a room. Obviously, dorm lamps rarely make for a pretty source of ambient lighting, but if you can try and make sure that your main lighting source both gives off the right amount and color of light but is also nice to look at.

Task lighting

Desk lamps, bed lamps, and other such localized reading lamps are usually the best things to use when you want to work or study in your dorm room. Since you’ll use them when you’re doing such specific and highly important tasks, it’s important to make sure that they are well-placed and give off an adequate amount and type of light. A nice-looking desk lamp is usually among the first mentions on any list of dorm room decorating ideas.

Accent lighting

This type of lighting is what’s usually used to accent specific objects of interest, whether indoors or outdoors. In a dorm room, such objects can be a pretty flower, a picture or a portrait, a bookshelf, wallpaper or anything you want to be accented. Doing this can help you a lot when it comes to creating a pleasant studying atmosphere for yourself and your roommate.

Natural light

Let’s not forget the most healthy, pleasant and productivity-stimulating type of light – natural light. Dorm rooms rarely have the largest and prettiest windows, but if you can choose your dorm room, the best advice we can give you is to look for large windows. Whatever your window is, however, when you’re setting up your work station make sure that you adjust it in such a way that the natural light falling on it is as rich and long-lasting as possible, as long as it doesn’t shine directly in your computer’s monitor and doesn’t create glare.

So, let’s go over some of the smarter accent, ambient and task lighting ways to decorate your dorm room using lighting:

• Put some LED candles on your work desk or on a nearby shelf. LED lights for dorm room and work station needs are always a good idea. LED candles, in particular, can create a very pleasant ambience and still provide a fair bit of task lighting at the same time. They don’t emit warmth, they are not dangerous for their surroundings, they consume just a little bit of electricity, and as long as they are not directly in front of your eyes they won’t tire your eyesight either.
• Dorm room string lights are another cool option. Typically used for game rooms and backyards, string lights make for an excellent and cheap decoration in any room. They no longer come in the cold and harsh blue colors they used to in the past and instead nowadays they provide a pleasant warm light that can help you study and work, as well as simply improve the feel of your dorm room. What’s more, string lights are probably the most versatile tool you can find in terms of the possibilities they open up for you:
  • String lights can be wrapped around mirrors or other attention-grabbing objects.
  • Wrap string lights around a long twig and hang them above your bed as a bed lamp.
  • Hang them together with your drapes to create additional ambient lighting. You can use bigger bulbs or HID bulbs to make sure that light will be even brighter if you need it to be.
  • Drape string lights over a bookshelf to accent it.
  • Create your own wall art using string lights. With enough string lights you can make pretty much anything on your wall – a string light tree, a house, a pet, a holiday decoration, or anything else you fancy.
  • Fill empty wine bottles with string lights for a stunningly effective centerpiece.
• LED spotlights also make for cool lights for a dorm room and other similar places. They can be used as accent lighting and be pointed at any object of interest such as a painting, a diploma, a cherished family photo, a decorative flower or a tree, and so on.
• Light art. There are numerous types of wall art that uses LED lights. Because the light diodes in LED lights are so small, many artists and marquee art manufacturers have learned to use them for crafty light compositions. Something as simple as a LED wall letter art can make for a nice decoration while also providing a fair bit of light for specific situations.

Of course, the possibilities are as numerous as your imagination is vast – the things that can be achieved with lights such as small LED lights or string lights are almost endless. There are countless DIY ideas you can find online to help you decorate your dorm room in the best possible way.