Design And Make Your Own Gallery Wall

Let’s take your home decorating to a new level

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Jovi Figueroa

April 8, 2021, 04:12 PM

This year has definitely made interior designers out of all of us, home buddies. From room makeovers to practical home solutions, many of us found some way to transform our homes into comfortable cabins that made us at least feel a bit better as we were required to stay home to prevent the spread of the virus.

If you have bare walls at home, there’s so many things you can experiment with to make it not as boring. You can install floating shelves, create a plant rack, hang a statement art piece, or maybe even cover it up with a distinct wallpaper.

One of the more fun and personal things that you can do with a bare wall is to turn it into a gallery wall. Gallery walls are timeless, just like hardwood floors or marble kitchen countertops. They’re also very easy to personalize, so you can turn mementos and family photographs into easy home décor.

Sun Ngo/Chatelaine

A great gallery wall can be anything you want it to be—photographs, art, drawings, postcards, posters or even plates and jewelry and toys. The possibilities are really endless! But for beginners, you may also want to stick to the regular framed and canvas pieces, just so your gallery wall won’t look like a chop suey of uncoordinated pieces.

If you’re ready to start planning and building your gallery wall, here are some tips from us and from our favorite frame and print shops to help you.

VIP..pictures

Plan before you buy and mount

What exactly goes into a gallery wall? Well, actually, anything! This can make this process overwhelming for some. While it’s tempting to just go ahead and buy all sorts of frames to stick in your wall, it’s best to survey first what you have before jumping right ahead.

First, measure your wall. How much space do you have? When you have a theme in mind and when you think you have all the items that you want to hang in your wall, it’s always best to lay out the grid somewhere else to visualize it before you start mounting. If you’re tech-savvy and have no space to part your grid in your house, it’s best to create a digital grid. Take photos of the items that you have and lay it out on your computer to visualize. If you have some space or a room to spare, then you can lay it out physically to give you a sense of what you have and what you lack. This is especially important when you’re creating an irregular gallery wall like this one from VIP.pictures.

VIP.pictures

Keep to a cohesive color palette or a stick to a theme

Part of planning your grid is determining what can make your gallery wall look clean and cohesive. An easy way to go about this is to pick a theme or just choose a color palette that goes well with the rest of the room.

For a theme, most people choose to create a photo wall, composed of photos of the family or the couple. You can also keep it simple and minimalist like this photo wall by Frame Forte. Even though the frames are different sizes, it looks orderly and clean because the color is matched with the room.

Frame Forte

Go regular or irregular

For easy planning and mounting, you can go with a regular gallery wall, where all the pieces are of the same size and make. If you decide to go canvas prints, then get one size and replicate it over your wall. If you decide to go frames, then get the same size and frame style, and do the same. It’s easy and clean, just like this set-up by Frame Forte.

Frame Forte

You can also go irregular, meaning you can play with different sizes and shapes for your gallery wall. But as long as you kept to a color or theme, mixing and matching sizes and shapes shouldn’t make your gallery wall chaotic—it just makes it more dynamic. Look how well this was pulled off by The Printerie.

The Printerie

Explore the options in your home

When we think about a gallery wall, the first thing that comes to mind is the space on top of a couch or TV set. But when you really think about it, you can transform any bare wall in your home into a beautiful gallery! This means you can dress up your kitchen, dining area, or toilet, and you can even plan for a floor to ceiling gallery.

One of the most popular choices of people is to turn their staircase into a wall gallery, since this space is usually unused and bare. Check out this super easy tiled gallery by VIP.pictures, where they turned the staircase into a beautiful showcase.

VIP.pictures

Personalize and be creative!

The best thing about doing your own gallery wall is you can make it as personal as you want it to be. Do you want to hang some art pieces you or your kids have done personally? Do you want to frame a movie ticket from your first date or a boarding pass from your first trip together with your partner? Do you want to print some photographs that remind you of the good ol’ days? Just let your imagination run free!

How about printing your photos or artworks into canvas prints? At The Printerie, your walls will come to life with their single and multiple canvas print packages. For easy tiling, you can get their square canvas prints, which start at 300 pesos each. For something more personalized, you customize the size of your canvas prints or choose a multi-print package to get discounted prices. For a creative but minimalist canvas wall, you can also choose to split one image into multiple canvasses.

The Printerie

If you prefer frames, Frame Forte can custom modern framing and layout design for your gallery walls. They use dye sublimation printing on acid-free photo paper so the photos won’t fade quickly, and they provide easy-tack drill-less hooks so you don’t have to damage your walls to hang their frames. The frames are also hugely customizable, and you can choose the frame finish (black, white, beech, dark brown, silver, and gold available), material (wood and polystyrene), size (from 4 inches to 20 inches), and application (flat frame or shadow box).

In fact, if you’d like to keep things simple, you can ask Frame Forte to lay out your gallery wall as well. Just send them your photographs and your space, and they will design the perfect layout for your frames.

Frame Forte

If you’re the type of person who likes to switch things around often, you might want the magnetic frames offered by VIP.pictures. Their magnetic photo tiles come with an adhesive backing with magnet so you can hang the photos on the wall and easily move it around if you’re not satisfied with their position. They come in regular square, rectangle, and even quirky hexagonal cuts, to match your needs and preferences. Their prices start at 220 pesos for an 8x8 magnetic photo tile, but they have more sizes and options upon request.

VIP.pictures

To add warmth and dimension to your photo gallery, also check out M.A. Studio’s custom wood signs. There’s no paper, cloth, or glass here; only 100% wood hand-painted to your specifications. You can choose your quote, text, or even drawing to be painted on your chosen size and stain of wood, and have it ready for hanging or mounting on your gallery wall. M.A. Studio can also customize orders if you need special applications (such as giant scrabble tiles), outlined portraits, or calligraphy.

M.A. Studio

Ready to start building or need more pegs? Check out the gallery below for more gallery wall inspiration from M.A. Studio, VIP.pictures, Frame Forte, and The Printerie.