You can brighten up your walls without paint by using wallpaper, wall tiles, wood paneling or by decorating your walls with paintings.

Wall Tiles or Stone: There are brick like wall tiles available in addition to stone tiles. You can use these to cover up a portion of your wall that you like to highlight. Slate tiles are also used in some countries for wall finishing. The options are endless but we suggest using wall tiles and stone on smaller areas of walls. An example would be around the fireplace. 

Wallpaper: The easiest and the most traditional way of covering a wall is by using wallpaper. There is a huge variety of wallpaper available in the market ranging from simple designs to complex patterns. And it comes in different colours that you can choose from. It is important however to get the wallpaper installed by a specialist to ensure the seams match and there are no wrinkles.

Lighting: You can brighten up your walls in many ways by the use of indoor lighting. The lighting can be either on the ceiling or it could be from a floor upright lamp or alternatively could be from focus lights pointing towards the walls. The walls would probably need additional decoration in addition to the lighting to make it look good.

Wood panelling: Wall panelling in wood is a great way to cover up your interior walls including basement walls and makes the space around it look warm and cosy. Make sure you finish the wood with polish and teal wood is a good but expensive way to furnish your walls.

Paintings & Artifacts: There could be numerous wall paintings, shelving and artifacts that you could install in various sizes to cover up your walls. You could create a mural on the wall as well. You can find inexpensive paintings and fit them on ready made frames available in stores such as Walmart or Michaels. You could choose paintings of different colours but the same intensity and these could come in large or small sizes. 

There are multiple ways to cover up and brighten your walls without paint which are worth trying when paint is not an option.