6 things to consider when putting together a gallery wall.
Hello everybody. Today I wanted to just quickly run through some tips that I have about considering a gallery wall for your bedroom. I get lots of questions about gallery walls, so I hope this helps in answering some of them.
1. Safety
If your bedroom is going to be a place where children play or a children's bedroom, I really recommend that you go with perspex rather than glass in your frames. Unless you're getting a lot of direct sun on the wall where your art is going to be placed (the sun can give the plastic a bit of a glare), I find the perspex to work really well, and be a lot more affordable. It also means you can relax and not have to worry about children using that space.
2. Your Highlight Feature
The second tip that I have for you is to think about what you want to be the highlight in the room. If you have a small room, you only really want one main feature with a second less dominant feature in your room.
So, if you would like your bed linen to be the feature then think about your gallery wall as being more understated. If this is the case you could choose black and white or muted pastels for your art, and then allow the bed linen to really take centre stage. If you prefer you can swap this principle around and have your bed linen as more understated. Of course if your design style is all about colour and more colour, then you can go to town and skip this tip altogether!
3. Cohesion
Cohesion is really key to think about if you're not wanting the room to look too busy. One way to help your gallery wall look more cohesive is to use the same type of frames. Whether it's black, metal or a blonde timber choosing to buy all the same frames will bring some cohesion into the gallery wall, especially if you're going to use lots of colour or different photographs of full colour inside your frames. This tip will tie the whole thing together and make it look like one design feature.
4. Proportion & Look
My next tip, which is the one I see people have problems with is proportion. It’s important to think the sizes of frames you want for your gallery wall you hit the shops. An easy way to do this is to map out with painters tape on the wall, the actual size of the the frames on the wall (not the art that's going to go inside the frame, but the actual size of the frame). This will help you to work out what spacing you want in between the frames and also the best size frames for your wall.
I find that people are more afraid to go with the bigger sized frames and think that smaller is safer. Remember if your frames are too small they will look like tiny little full stops on the wall, and you want is the size of the frames to be in proportion with the wall overall.
If you're really stuck on working out frame sizes you can ask an interior designer can help you. We can actually show you a 3D image of the wall to scale and try out around with different frame sizes and types of art to help you find the perfect combination (I have a post on Instagram showing how I worked with a client giving her lots of different options for frame sizes and art if that’s helpful). This method means you can actually see how the art will look in your space before purchasing any.
5. Centre the Art
My next tip is to think about how the gallery wall is centred to the wall that is placed on. If you've got furniture like a bed or a bookcase that's going on that wall it’s important to think about how to centre the gallery wall with those pieces. I like to think about all of the individual art pieces as one big piece when deciding how to centre the gallery wall overall.
You want to centre your art works from the top of the ceiling to the top of the furniture piece. Centreing it correctly means your eyes can easily move over the gallery wall without you noticing that something doesn’t look quite right (by that I mean it doesn’t look a little too high or low on the wall).
6. Layout
There's so many different layouts that you can go with with gallery walls. You can have a more traditional look with a grid layout in a square or rectangle shape, or you could have linear layout with all your art in a line or if you like more of an organic look, you can have a group of prints set up in an asymmetrical way, which I really like.
If you like more of an organic layout, try to think about having your bigger pieces in the middle of your gallery wall, and your smaller pieces around the outside.
So there’s my tips, I hope they are helpful.
If you would like some help with the decorating of your home, you can reach me here.
I'll catch you again really soon.