DIYing a stunning art gallery wall using a simple trick

3 June, 2021

Art gallery wall

I am one of those procrastinators, who always find excuses. I will do this only after I do that. That must be my motto. Due to this, I was postponing the art gallery wall for many months. I want to start renovating my apartment at some point at the end of this year, and I always thought I better create an art gallery wall only when the renovation is done. And I ended up living in a room with empty white walls. So, I decided that this needs to be changed and here we are.

Black and white abstract picture in a frame

When it comes to gallery wall aesthetics, my personal taste is black and white abstract pictures, frames with different sizes and shapes and maybe one or two pictures with accent colours. I have found amazing free black and white images in the free stock websites and printed them on paper. The idea is to print the images in a bit smaller size than the frame they will be placed into. Besides, I got black and white paper sheets that will be some sort of a passe-partout. The frames are mostly IKEA’s FISKBO picture frames and some of the frames I found on the streets of Berlin, so I don’t know the brand.

I always start with the biggest picture first and then add smaller pictures around. But this time I will do it differently.

Measuring the picture frame on the baking paper

Marking the hole for the nail to hand the picture frame

First, I will put again the biggest picture, which is my personal photography, I took in Iceland a few years back. But instead of adding other pictures straight away, I will want to play around with the placeholders to kind of see beforehand, how will my gallery layout look like. How do I do placeholders? Hm, that’s easy. All you need is baking paper, scissors, a black marker and tape.

What you need to do is to place the picture frame on the top of the baking paper and mark the size of it. Then you cut the paper so it will represent the placeholder. Here is the second trick. Mark as well the exact place where supposed to be the nail.

Now, when all the placeholders are done, you just play with them by attaching them to the wall with the tape. When you are happy with the result, the fun begins. You hammer nails to the places where you have marked before and that will massively simplify putting the pictures in the right places on the wall. I would also suggest rolling and keeping those baking paper placeholders for the future in case you want to replace or refresh the gallery on your wall.

I wanted to bring a bit of extra interest to my gallery and added 3-dimensional paper letters. For one of the letters I am using … ta-da-da… dramatic pause… a two-sided tape.

Using two-sided tame for the 3D letter L

One of the pictures had no image because I wanted to draw something simple by myself. I have seen in some interior designs’ pictures with only one letter of the alphabet. I am going to use the Swedish letter Å (a with a circle, which pronounce like a long o). I am going to use a simple paintbrush and black acrylic paint. When the drawing dries, I put it in the picture frames and up to my art gallery wall.