Your Complete Guide To Creating A Gallery Wall.
Why A Gallery Wall?
Are you looking for an alternative to the feature wall? Want to display your family photographs or art that you love in a way that matches your home design? Then a gallery wall might be for you.
Gallery walls or photo walls have become quite popular over the last few years, providing an easy way to update your interiors, transform bland walls, create a focal point in your home, and bring some character and personality to your living space. Instead of using paint or wallpaper for a feature wall, you can do so with a gallery wall, and it can be placed anywhere in your home. Pulling a gallery wall of your own together might feel a little daunting at first. Art can be expensive, and curating personal items/photos can take a decent amount of time.
What is a Gallery Wall?
A gallery wall is a curated display of photographs, posters or prints, creatively arranged on a wall, commonly made using photo frames.
What kind of Gallery Wall to choose?
There are two main options to consider for your Gallery Wall:
You can create a Gallery Wall using your own photographs and art and purchase suitably sized picture frames to hang on the wall.
You can buy a curated set of framed wall prints (these are often themed such as botanical or landscape prints), that you can simply hang on the wall.
Creating Your Gallery Wall.
1. Start Collecting.
You need to know what you have to work with so your first step is to start collecting things that you think might work for your Gallery Wall. These can be photographs that mean a lot to you such as wedding pictures, it could be a keepsake or sentimental items such as your wedding invitations or it could be pieces of art or prints that you really like.
Remember inspiration can come from anywhere. It could be from your favourite coffee shop, at a friends place, a Pinterest board. There is inspiration everywhere, once you start to research you will notice Gallery Walls come in many different styles and there are very few set rules to creating them.
Narrowing down what you want to have within your Gallery Wall is an important part of the process, you need to know what you have to work with.
2. Build a Theme.
When you have a selection of images or art that you're happy with, pick out your favourites. Start to group these by themes e.g. family celebrations, weddings, art prints that you love, holidays or trips. Be creative and focus on groupings that means something to you, after all, you will be the one looking at these days. For art or prints, select colours that go with your room decor or suit the tone of the space that you want to put your gallery wall in. Take your time to do these groupings. You may change your mind multiple times and that’s part of the process.
3. Measure up.
Measure your wall space and lay your collection on the floor. Stand back and look at them all together (allow a bit of space between them for the frames). Does anything jump out as not quite working? If yes, take it out. Or is there room for you to add more? Take a photo of your possible combinations. You may end up with several combinations that work. Take photos of them all. It can be really helpful to use masking tape to lay them out on the wall itself so you can visualise where they will be.
4. Pick your frames.
When you are happy with the layout, get your frames. You need to decide whether you want them to blend in or contrast with the wall or stand out in their own right. Decide if you want them all the same, or if you want lots of different colours. A white or neutral frame is perfect for Scandi-style interiors, while black picture frames are more suited to contemporary or industrial themed interiors.
5. Hanging
You'll need nails or picture hooks and a hammer or even, command hooks. Draw lightly in pencil on the walls where the top corners of the frames will be. Measure and mark how much lower down the picture frame you want your nail holes. Start hammering and get them all up. Use a spirit level to make sure everything is straight. If you are not confident that you can do this yourself, ask a handyman to do this step for you.
6. Enjoy The Final Look.
Stand back, enjoy, and bask in the glory of your creation. Remember, your gallery can be easily be swapped or updated with new favourites whenever you feel like it. For example, if you've got new photoshoot prints, you can easily swap them into the Gallery Wall. Just decide what you want to take down and either remount or replace it with a similar-sized piece.
