Tips for creating the perfect gallery wall

Have you ever looked at the walls of your apartment or house and thought to yourself that they look really bland? A nice way to liven up your home, while projecting your personality outwards, is a gallery wall.

And while the general misconception dictates that this type of home decor needs to be expensive, carefully curated, and hand-picked over the years, it doesn’t really have to be that way. We’ll teach you how to create the perfect gallery wall from scratch using nothing but your own memories and favorite digital art. It can be intimidating and confusing to look at a blank wall and try to piece everything together straight from the get-go, so let’s take this step-by-step, shall we?

Gallery Wall Location

First and foremost you need to decide where exactly you want to assemble your masterpiece.  When you think of a gallery wall, the first thing that comes to your mind is usually a tall and wide free space in some sort of designer loft. And that’s nice and all, but also somewhat wrong. Gallery walls are the perfect decor for small places that are just begging to be brightened up. Think about the unused space above and off the sides of a doorway, as well as the sides of a window, or the one atop your TV or fireplace. Just look around your home and you’re sure to find at least a couple of spots that could pull the whole place tighter together if you were to add some pieces.

Gallery Wall Theme

Once you’ve decided with the room and place it’s time to think about the, arguably, most important part - the theme of your gallery wall. Try to envision the feeling that you want this decor to give out and spread through your house. Here’s a couple of ideas for inspiration:

1. Personal Nothing brings warmth to a room like a selection of your personal memories, pictures from vacations, notable events, children’s drawings or your personal art. We’d recommend metal prints as they stand the test of time the best, and will be sure to keep your dearest memories as fresh as if they happened yesterday.
2. Art & Photography While family photos are oft-used in decor, sometimes you want to keep those intimate moments all to yourself in a photo album. Instead, you can opt for digital art, sketches, and etchings, pieces that you commissioned from an artist or beautiful landscape pictures from your favorite photographer.
3. Color. Color? Color! Yep, color can totally be the central theme of a gallery wall! Is your favorite color red? Get a picture of a rose, one of a glass of red wine with a red sunset in the background, one with some red leaves, and one with you in your favorite red piece of clothing - voila, you have a small grid of a gallery wall. Acrylic prints would be perfect for this theme, they allow all the different hues to stand out on their own, as well as show off the depth of color.
4. Controlled Chaos Go wild, mix & match, the absence of a theme is also a theme! Grab some pictures from your travels, choose your favorite art pieces, and mix in some historic photos. Combine different materials put canvas next to acrylic and poster prints, even add some metal to the equation. Choose frames of different shapes and colors, or go totally frameless. The key to making this a pleasant piece, instead of a random mash-up, is finding one key element that ties it all together.

Via chelceytate.com

Gallery Wall Arrangements

Now it’s time to think of an arrangement and even here, there is a variety of choices to be made. Just go with the one that will work best with your theme and overall room design.

1. Linear Simple and straightforward. Just choose the images and line them up in your preferred location. They can be perfectly symmetrical to each other or not at all. One piece of an idea is lining up pictures, with each one bigger than the last, showing the passage of time. The first one can be your child, or yourself, in kindergarten, with the next one in school, and college afterward. The same can be done with your pet or maybe a plant you have been growing since it was a seed.
2. Grid Depending on the theme and space you’re working with, this can be a square or rectangular shape and be made up of 4, 6, 8, and so on, separate images. Just as in the linear case they can be symmetrical or mismatched. Poster and canvas prints would be best for this and the last arrangement, as their sharp edges will really bring a sense of uniformity and unify the whole ensemble together.
3. Controlled Chaos We’re going back to our last point in the previous list. The key element that we spoke about there, may very well be the shape in which you arrange your pieces. All those elements from different materials and of different shapes can create a perfect square, just like in a grid scenario.
4. More is Less This one can be a bit tricky, but the result is definitely worth the effort. Any of the previous arrangements can be used to achieve this effect, depending on what you choose to go for. Select one larger image and break it down into any number of smaller images. They can be of any shape and size. Once you have them on your hands, all that is left is to re-arrange them into the original image, like a big puzzle on the wall.

Gallery Wall Tips

Before ordering the pieces you want, try printing them on a regular piece of paper and arranging them on a flat surface, so you get a better understanding of what the end result will be like. You can do the same with the actual pieces, by arranging them on the floor in front of the wall where they will be hanged. Just in case you want to make some last minute changes.

Don’t stop once you did the hanging! As the saying goes - there’s always room for improvement. You can always add or replace pieces, with others that would fit better or mean more to you. Look to adding some trinkets from your travels that can be hanged by the corner of a piece, maybe glue a ribbon your child got a school, or a stick a movie ticket from a first date somewhere in there.

In case you decide to go with different materials, don’t worry about having to order them from different places and get into logistic hell to figure out when you’re going to get them. You can get everything mentioned in this article from Mixbook - acrylic, metal, poster, and canvas prints, with different colored frames or none at all.

Show us your gallery walls by posting them on your Instagram account and tagging #MixbookMoment! Don’t hesitate to tell us which idea you liked best by dropping a message in the comment section!