If your home seems a little lackluster or boring, then perhaps you should turn to lighting to set a mood and create drama within a room.  Instead of painting or hanging a new piece of artwork, lighting can turn a room into a completely different place by introducing shadows and spotlights.  Use the tips below to create drama through lighting in your own home.

• Use sconces to draw attention to a bookshelf or picture arrangement.  They provide a beautiful accent of light at eye level, and can also be placed upon a mirror for added reflection and drama.

• Track lighting can be positioned to spotlight a certain area or sculpture, while leaving others mysteriously in the shadows.  The lighting can be adjusted to the occasion and task at hand.

• Plants can provide a great place to work with interesting shadows and dramatic lighting.  Can lights positioned below a large plant will produce abstract and interesting shadows, while a plant in the spotlight is a fabulous and exotic look.

• Program your lighting to adjust with the time of day.  Some times of day require brighter task lighting, while you may want a softer dim light in the evening.  This could be especially helpful in the kitchen or dining room where sometimes you may have a need for bright lighting for a school project one day and soft lighting for a dinner party the next evening.

• If you are trying to make a small room look larger, then a bright wash of light on one wall will make the other three seem to recede and in turn, the room will seem bigger than it actually is.

With planning and a sense of the look that you are trying to achieve through lighting, you can completely change the mood and feel of a room.  The drama created by lighting can be one of the biggest improvements that you can make in a room; you can even set the lighting so that the look can change throughout the day and depending on the task.