Gallery Wall

I've been thinking about creating a gallery wall on the wall between the stairs, but wasn't sure how I wanted it to look - all the same size or different shapes, lined up in neat even rows like a grid or freestyle, all the same color frames or different, black and white or colored pictures...so many decisions! Then I was inspired by Mark Comon's tips on matting and framing (click here and here for those posts) and decided to stop thinking and just do it already.

 I gathered up what I had around the house, surprisingly we are already sort of following Mark's "rules" and have quite a few black and white frames on hand - and that helped me decide which direction I wanted to go. With the different size frames we already have I'll go with freestyle (meaning not evenly spaced in rows), colored pictures and photos, mostly black and white frames.

I'm sure there are lots of ways to figure out how to make a gallery wall, this is what I did:

• measure the area of the wall where the collection will be
• put blue painter tape on the floor (I marked the corners only but you could mask off the whole square) to get an idea of how big the space is you are planning to fill
• lay out all of the pictures on the floor inside the area you have masked off
• move the pictures around on the floor (over and over and over) until you have them just right. The hardest part of this is trying to imagine how they will look once up on the wall - remember that the ones on the floor at the bottom of your masked area will be closer to the ground so if they are too small or detailed people are going to have to stoop down to see them!

lay out the pictures on the floor to figure out where they will go on the wall

• once I decided how I wanted them, I took the largest one on the top row and figured out how high I wanted it to be on the wall. Then I freaked out cuz what if I started wrong and then the whole thing would be off! So I got big sheets of paper approx the same size as the top row of pictures and taped them up where I thought the pictures would go and played with them until it felt pretty centered and high enough - it felt weird to hang pictures up that high and the paper helped me determine what would look good.

I used some big pieces of paper to help decide where to start

• Starting with that largest picture I pounded in the first of many nails! One at a time I removed a picture from the floor and hung it, then measured 1.5" space between it and the next picture...I did the 4 top pictures first and then worked my way down. I couldn't keep up with the 1.5" spacing when I got to the small frames so at that point I just eyeballed what I thought looked good.

There is open space if I find more small pictures to add above and below this arrangement, and we could even continue the gallery on the side walls if we collect more pieces. I love how this turned out!