A gallery wall is a great way to elevate your space. It’s the perfect chance to make a display that reflects your personality, and it adds immeasurable character to a room. However, gallery walls can be tough to plan, arrange and hang.
If you need some tips of how to make a high-end looking wall (at a more affordable price), below are some tips that helped bring mine together.
Gather your art
Buying art is soooo expensive. I love displaying art that I’ve collected throughout the years, but I definitely didn’t have enough to fill a wall. But that’s okay! You can use stuff around your home. Just think about your color scheme. Are you going for monochromatic? Are you matching the wall to the surrounding room? Look for black and white photographs you have, polaroids, postcards from friends, greeting cards, maps, book pages, or drawings you have that might work with your color scheme. Sometimes, simpler is better (I prefer muted colors over vibrant rainbows, but that’s just me).You can even use small mirrors and clocks to break it up.
I personally used a couple postcards, some sketches I had made previously, a couple wedding photos, and some paintings from my European travels.
Where to get picture frames
Picture frames can get pricey, so I went hunting. I got a couple from Salvation Army, Target, Home Goods and Amazon. I used one from Pottery Barn that I already had, which was higher end in price.
It’s also a good idea to pick around 2-3 colors of frames. It’s enough to create variation without it getting chaotic. You can mix and max textures and shapes though as much as you’d like.
Here are some links I found to some of the frames I used:
Amazon: 8×10 Gold Spiral Frame
Amazon: 9×12 Dark Wood Frame
Formerly Homegoods: 4×6 Rachel Zoe Ornate Gold Frame
Formerly Homegoods: 4×6 Rachel Zoe thin white picture frame
Target: 12×12 Hearth and Hand Skier Framed Wall Art (includes the art).
Formerly Target: Hearth & Hand Magnolia 10×14 Tree Sketch (includes the art).
Artfully: Chic girl in black outfit (art) – technically titled “Black Suit.”
Map it out
The easiest way to design your wall is to do it on the floor first. Measure the height and width of your wall space and use painter’s tape to mark out your borders on the ground. This makes it a lot easier to play with what you’ve got.
Pick a center piece. It doesn’t have to be your largest piece of art, but it should be large enough to wrap other items around it. Stagger your frames so that two of the same aren’t touching or are close together.
Spread out your largest pieces. It’s best not to put the largest ones all in one spot: balance it out by placing them in different corners of the space, and then fill in the gaps with smaller frames.
Mix vertical and horizontal – I find that it’s more dynamic to change up the variation of the orientation, so do a mixture of both.
Cut them out – a tip that I have seen everywhere else is to trace all of your frames with paper and cut them out. You can arrange them on the actual wall with tape to get a more precise idea of the layout. However, we skipped this step and felt confident with our capabilities.
Get them on the wall!
Start by nailing up one of your largest pieces. Be sure to pay attention to where the nail is going to sit to hold the frame up. Grab a buddy to help you mark the area with a pencil or use your fingers to mark the sides of the top of the frame and place a nail equidistant between your fingers. Then gently hammer it into the wall. Hang the frame and use a level to make sure it’s not crooked.
Hang each item one by one. The nice things about creating a gallery wall like this, it doesn’t have to be perfect and the spacing between each frame doesn’t have to be super exact or meticulous.
For the smaller frames (which are harder to hang with nails), I opted to use some Command strips instead.
More on the blog
If this was helpful for you on how to make a gallery wall, check out some of my other content, like How to add Box Molding to a Living Room or my various dinner recipes to get you through the week.
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