How to create an Art Gallery wall

So many blog posts on Art Gallery walls (so popular right now!) just tell you some rules for alignment or composition and give you tips on what goes together and how you can lay it out to give visual interest. But I think you shouldn’t take it too seriously, don’t overthink it… there’s no right or wrong, what’s included is up to you. The images you select should represent your life moments – you are the common thread tying it all together. And the best thing about an Art Gallery wall?? You can add to it, it’s not really a finished thing. As you collect more life stories, so your wall can change as well. So I like compositions that are quite free-form, allowing you to add on, or shift things, nothing too structured (like those people who make heart-shapes out of their images! urgh! you’re trying too hard!!!) it should make sense to you.

But what do you do once you’ve got all these wonderful pieces of art collected from your lifetime? How do you actually get them up onto the wall without smashing a thousand tiny holes into your gib from moving things around and making ‘adjustments’? Just follow these simple steps….

Preparation is the key to success for so many things in life, and this is no exception.

Before you start, gather your tools;
Large roll of paper (like leftover wrapping paper or brown paper)
Masking tape
Marker
Scissors
Hammer and nails/picture hooks or perhaps this nifty picture-hanging velcro
A spirit level
Measuring tape

Step One

Get all the pictures or items you want up on the wall and trace around them onto the brown paper (or old wrapping paper) so that you have a paper template of each. You’re going to tape them up on the wall with the masking tape, which will allow you to move them around and see how your composition looks before you start banging holes in the wall willy-nilly.

Step Two

Now make some space and have a little play around with layouts on the floor, so you can see how each frame relates to it’s neighbour. Tell a little story, make different shapes, leave space for later additions. Pay attention to size, spaces between each frame, and alignment of the frames. Having some structure here can make the whole thing look less higgledy-piggledy.

Step Three

Once you’re happy with your composition on the floor, go ahead and place your paper templates on the wall! Measure the wall, decide if you want your composition to be centred on the wall, or perhaps centred to match something opposite – like a fireplace, or centred above the sofa? Stand back and eyeball the whole thing critically and then go ahead and make adjustments. During this step, we kept being thwarted by cheap masking tape and our templates kept falling off the wall! Very annoying having to remeasure and use the level to make sure our templates were straight. However, they do say to measure twice (or four times) and nail once.

Step Four

Now the moment of truth! So theoretically, with all this careful preparation, aligning the paper templates and making sure that they were level, you should be able to measure on your picture where the hook needs to go and then just bang it in through the paper. Next you hang the picture over the paper (and it should match exactly), then you rip the paper off the wall from behind the picture! Voila! Actually, it’s easier to rip the paper off the picture hook and then hang the picture, as we found out! 

Or even better, you could use these 3M picture hanging strips, which are a kind of velcro for sticking pictures to the wall. In true 3M style, they peel away from the wall when you’re done without doing any damage to your paintwork. You would need to guess at how heavy each picture frame is though, as the smaller strips can only hold so much.

Step Five

Repeat step four until you are completed! This did take a couple of hours and quite a lot of measuring, having two pairs of hands was very handy as well. You’ll notice the small central picture is positioned so that the top of the dog frame on the right and the bottom of the dog frame on the left aligns with this frame. That means the illustration underneath has the same size gap along it’s entire frame. We’ve also left more space on either side so that additional pictures can be added and the shape can be melded to go above the floor lamp on the right. Seeing the end result is so satisfying!

I recently completed a design board for this client’s multifunctional kitchen space. To see this work, please click here.