Gallery Wall 101
To begin any gallery wall in our home, I like to gather a lot more images than I think I will need. Configuring the best layout does not always go planned. Sometimes, it’s a smooth organic layout and other times it can get tricky.
Gallery walls can be made in simple ways or dramatic ones. We lean towards the latter.
For example, if you want about 7 images for your gallery (odds are better than evens) then gather about 10 if you can. Look for a variety in sizes and shapes. Large, medium, small, horizontal, vertical, square, round, oval etc. In addition to variety of sizes I like to look for different styles for balance. Sometimes too many antiques can change the style of the home rather than giving it the depth we want. Max is always pushing for more modern touches to keep it from looking overwhelming with antiques and I agree.
Looking at all the gathered images pick your largest photo/frame/picture as the anchor. This is very important because you want to love the largest one the most since we’ll work everything else around it. Grab the next biggest piece and we’ll offset it from the largest moving down to the smallest. Knowing that you’ll go from the biggest to smallest can help you find if you have too many that are the same size. It will also help you pick which ones you like the most.
I like to lay all of mine all out on the ground. This way I can get a good idea of the possibilities. Makes moving them around a lot easier and you for the most part can see how it will look. If you want to use painters tape on the wall to mark them out you can but for me I prefer using the floor. Starting with the largest one we talked about earlier I like to place it somewhat front and center. Remember it’s anchoring the wall so that everything else can fall into place.
Grabbing the second largest picture place it near the right or left top corner. I don’t advise putting it directly above, below, or immediately to the side. In my experience placing it near the right or left corners works more easily. It can overlap from the corners and creep towards the sides or near the top middle but again, I don’t advise it being entirely above, below, or immediately to the side.
From there you just repeat the process keeping items that are similar in size offset. Try to do it almost like a triangle where similar sizes are in sets of threes and not directly above, below, or immediately next to each other. There are instances where I do break those rough guidelines and it’s when they’re different shapes or sizes. Here’s our gallery wall below for reference:
That big green one in the middle is the anchor we covered in the beginning step. This was our first setup for the gallery wall. Since then it has changed many times! After a few months, we decided to add more to the top right of the wall:
This is how we left it for another couple months until one day I got the urge to refresh it again. However, this time I decided to overlap some of the images. Learn more about that in the next Gallery Wall 101 post!