A few months ago, I wrote about how to create a gallery wall to showcase art in your living space. At the time, I used all the pictures I had framed in black to fill a portion of my blank wall knowing I would be adding on once I framed some additional pieces. After a couple of trips to my local IKEA, I was finally ready to finish up my gallery wall.
My original "lay everything out on the floor" trick was obviously not going to work because half of the art was already on the wall, so I needed another way to arrange my art. I used another trick, cutting out newspaper blocks the same size as the art I wanted to add and marking off the hanger placement on each piece. I removed a couple of the smaller pieces already on the wall to create a new overall grouping that worked for me. Best of all, once I had the final layout, it only took a couple of minutes to mark off all the locations for the nails through the holes already in the paper.
My husband was delighted with that last step because it meant he could just get up there and drill all the holes at the same time rather than the time-consuming process we went through originally with lots of measuring and fidgeting and tweaking. If I had to do the entire process over again, I would still lay things out on the floor to get an overall picture of the final product, but I would definitely make paper replicas of each piece because it made drilling the holes in the wall so very much easier.
I am thrilled with the end result though I know it is too regimented for some people. I've tried more random groupings in the past and I know they just don't work for me. Luckily, my husband shares my love of order and so is equally happy with the final result. I'm still not sure about the scale of the trunks underneath the art, but at the moment don't have a better piece to place along that wall.
Images: Colleen Quinn
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What a great idea! It's always nice for someone else to try something out themselves rather than just say, "Hey guys, I saw this thing in a picture that looks really cool!" My only worry is for the wee bit of art in the upper left corner. Wouldn't the point of a "gallery" wall be to make the artwork easy to peruse? I worry that no one will be able to fully appreciate that small piece!
Next tmw you do the whOle layout on the floor (I recently did this myself) tape a number of pieces of paper together to form one big piece to do your trial layout on. That way when you are happy with your order just trace the layout onto the paper and hang up.
Saved me a huge amount of time!
I've been wanting to do this to my dad's living room. He has barely any art up, and since he's not used to decorating on his own...
This might just be the push he needs to get it done!
Too much.
Good job, but I feel like now you need to move those furniture pieces over more toward the corner, since you squeezed everything in next to the wall. I've been getting ready to do a wall collage in my bedroom, so I've been buying inexpensive art on eBay and researching methodology for arranging such a wall. Every page I've come across says to hang smaller pieces closer to eye level and larger pieces can be hung farther out from there, which makes total sense. You don't want to stand on tiptoes to look at a tiny painting above your head. Here is one page I found with some good diagrams and tips on different arrangements: http://www.scrapnframes.com/SITE_EN/FRAMING/LayOutWall.html