There is so much more that goes into a gallery wall than simply picking out a few pieces of artwork that goes well together. Are the sizes right? Will the frames go together? Who’s going to hang it? Follow along to take a look at the steps we follow to get a seamless gallery wall.
1. We start by taking inventory of your existing pieces. From there, we fill in the gaps making sure we hit on a nice balance of portraits, organic art, colorful prints, black and white, antique and new, and modern art. We love adding unexpected items, like the sconce pictured below, mirrors and plates. The balance of all these elements is how you will make a new gallery wall look “collected.” Some of our favorite sources include Chairish, Artfully Walls, Scout Design Studio and Mary Maguire Art.
2. Once you have the main pieces, it’s time to lay it out. Pottery Barn has a great free service called Icovia where you can put in dimensions to see exactly how it’ll look. First measure your wall, and then map out the sizes of the prints. From there, we print photos of the art out to best fit the scaled drawing we made with Pottery Barn and check that the art works together. This tool can also help you figure out what size frame you need and if there’s room to add matting.
3. Figure out the framing/matting. Our go-to source for framing is Framebridge. They make it extremely easy - all you have to do is choose your frame, mail in the piece in a box they send you, and then it’s shipped back to you framed!
4. Now it’s time to hang the gallery wall. We highly recommend hiring a professional art hanger for this task - it can oftentimes be tedious to get it exactly right, and hiring a professional can save hours of having to move each piece an inch this way or an inch that way. Trust us, we know from experience ;)
