The Making of a Gallery Wall

The giant blank wall that sits behind the couch in our family has plagued me ever since we moved in...

What do you hang on a big wall that won't look end up looking puny?

Do you center your art above the couch or center it on the wall?

How do you jazz up the room and give it some personality?

After contemplating these issues for quite a while and spending a lot of time staring at the wall,

I finally decided a gallery wall would be the perfect solution.

It fills up the wall,

it doesn't have to be perfectly centered any which way,

and it gives us the opportunity to infuse our personality into the room through the use of different pictures and prints.

                                                                                     Source: None via Erin on Pinterest

                                                                                    Source: potterybarn.com via Erin on Pinterest

                                                                   Source: ourhumbleabowed.wordpress.com via Erin on Pinterest

But, MAN ALIVE, who knew gallery walls took so much planning!?

I started out by getting 2 Ribba frames from Ikea to hold two pictures I had purchased from Art.com (using a 50% off certificate from Groupon!) a while back.

 Close-up of Nautilus Shell Spirals by Eric Kamp

Harbor I by Amy Melious

From there, I cut out a bunch of newspapers that were the same size as the various sizes of Ribba frames from Ikea and started experimenting with placement on the wall.

I also knew I wanted to incorporate some non-framed elements into the gallery, like the faux clock face I made a while ago and a metal Schweppes clock face I found at an antique store, so I cut out newspaper circles too.

For weeks, I had various sizes of newspaper taped all over the wall.

I would place them and then look at it for a few days, then readjust, the look at it some more, then readjust, and on and on...until I was finally happy with the overall shape of the gallery.

Then it was off to Ikea to purchase the rest of the frames.

I took all three kiddos with me, thinking I could just drop them for a little play session in Ikea's Playland while I zipped through the store to grab my frames. After getting the kids all pumped up, their shoes off, and standing in line, I learned that kids have to be 3 years old AND potty trained to be left to play. 

Uuuugggghhh.

How did I miss that little tidbit of info!?

My kids are 3 months shy of their 3rd birthday and only one of them is potty trained.

So I begrudgingly drug all three of my toddlers, who are in the midst of their terrible twos, all through Ikea with me. Thank goodness for Ikea's Swedish Fish candy that I was able to use as a bribe for good behavior :)

But I digress...

Now the frames are all hung on the wall, waiting to be filled with gorgeousness. 

I'm not in love with how the lighthouse picture in the middle (taken during an East Coast road trip in the Outer Banks) looks, so I am planning on replacing it with a different picture of the same lighthouse, but in color instead of black and white. 
Like this...

I had wanted to incorporate the print below into the gallery, but after having in printed out at Kinko's, I realized it doesn't fit well into any of the frames, so am not sure if I will be using it after all.

                                                                    Source: simpleblueprint.typepad.com via Erin on Pinterest

As for the other pictures, we are scheduled to get our family pictures taken towards the end of the month, so hopefully those will turn out good and we can use some of those to fill up some more of the frames.

Here's one more look at how the gallery wall currently looks...

 

I'm still working on Jacob, trying to convince him to let me paint the entertainment center white...