Create your own home gallery

Plain walls are not necessarily bad, but they can be rather  lifeless and uninspiring.

Luckily, there are several simple ways of injecting life into a drab wall, and creating a gallery wall is one of them.

Creating your own gallery can be  time-consuming since you have to decide on the appropriate colours, frames and patterns but  with a few tools and some creativity, you can have a simple one within a short time. Besides, it is an affordable ways of transforming a room with paintings, photographs, illustrations and personal pieces that you cherish.

Whether you want to make a statement in your living room or simply want to make a staircase or blank wall come alive, a gallery is a fun way to achieve this.

Like any other form of art, a gallery walls offers a  great opportunity for self-expression.

For travel enthusiasts, it offers an opportunity to document those travel photos. You can include photographs of vacations, family photos, nature photos, photos capturing a memorable event you attended, artworks you bought or your children’s artworks.

A good gallery can be therapeutic and is a great way to display an art collection while also creating a beautiful focal point.

So what really makes a good gallery wall?

When creating a gallery wall, you don’t  have to fill every wall space with pictures. Furniture pieces create natural breaks in a wall and present empty wall spaces that are ideal for pictures. Consider the furniture and any architectural features on adjacent walls and how these break up wall space.

Also, if you’re working with a collection of artwork across themes, using frames of a similar design or style is one way to tie the collection to your home’s style.

There’s no law that says artwork has to be neatly or uniformly hung, so you can play about with their positioning. For instance, layering pieces on top of each other, creates a casual, pleasant vibe.

When creating a gallery, select a pattern that inspires you. It could be a random layout  or a grid, a matching artwork or varied, or mismatched frames.

Galleries can be tied together by a theme, frame colour, style or image palette.

LOOK AND FEEL  

Gallery walls can be both symmetrical (when displaying pieces that are of the same size) and asymmetrical (when the pieces vary in size).  The  important thing is to have a unifying element that brings everything together. This can be anything, from the artist and medium to the subject matter and time when the photos were taken or the pictures painted. 

COHESION

Cohesion in a gallery wall can enhance the “flow” of a room. This can be achieved by keeping a degree of consistency between the works and choosing pieces that reflect a range of colours and tones used throughout the room.

Also, keep in mind the height at which pieces are hung from both a safety and viewing perspective. Certain pieces are best appreciated from a particular height. 

You can combine art you’ve purchased with family photos, sculptures, artifacts and children’s drawings to add some fun to your gallery.

In a busy room with lots of patterns and textures, the key is to stick to a single hue, perhaps adding small splashes of colour here and there.

While small photos are often  disregarded on their own, they are useful when grouped together on a wall,  since that way, they attract much more attention.

More importantly, work from the centre; have one large centre piece then extend outwards.

But before you begin hanging the pieces on to the wall, lay the art  pieces out on the floor and cut newspaper equivalent to the size of each piece.

Using masking tape, position the paper on the wall as you would the art, then try  different arrangements until you achieve the desired effect. After

finding the layout you like,  can hang your pieces on the wall.