Creating a Gallery Wall For Your Home
We've broken it down into four easy steps:
- Choosing your theme
- Choosing a location in your room or home
- Arranging the art
- Correct Lighting
Personalising your room isn’t as challenging as it sounds, but there are a lot of ways you can go about it that you’ll often spend more time deciding how to do it than implementing it. The simplest option is often the most effective, and you can’t get any simpler than making a gallery wall for your room!
Gallery walls showcase artwork and turn an otherwise uninteresting part of the room into an eye-catching focal point. It establishes new colour and patterns into your living space and you get to showcase your aesthetic through the art you feature.
Whether you’re looking to add an artistic flair in your living room or add an interest point in your bedroom, gallery walls are the simplest way to enhance the aesthetics of your room. In this post, Urban Interiors shares how you can turn your empty wall into a gallery showcasing eye-catching art.
Step One: Choose a Theme
The artwork that you’ll be featuring in your new gallery should always have a unifying theme that binds and connects each piece. This is how your gallery wall evolves from a simple decorative element into a new focal point. A unifying theme also prevents cluttering, which is something you want to avoid when decorating your room.
When it comes to gallery walls, you have several theming options to choose from, but the most popular are basing it around colour, style, and medium.
Theming artwork around colour is the easiest as you don’t need to consider things like style or aesthetic; the unifying theme will be the colour and your chosen pieces will be united through the shared colour palette.
A theme that revolves around an art style is more challenging to do but it will have a more immediate impact on the general aesthetic of your room. Popular styles to theme around include canvas or acrylic prints featuring modern, contemporary, and reproductions of classic and fine art.
Finally, there’s medium which is theming around what kind of medium the art was made from. This is a less common theme to build a gallery wall around on but is a popular method in interior decorating smaller rooms.
Step Two: Choose a Location
Once you have a selection of artwork and a theme in mind, it’s time to decide where you want to establish your gallery wall. The simplest way to go about this is establishing the gallery wall on an existing focal point such as a fireplace or the tv area – essentially integrating the old focal point within the new gallery.
You can also make the gallery wall into a new focal area by filling in an empty wall with your themed artwork. If you do this method, you may need to rearrange the furniture and other decorative elements in the room. The décor should essentially expand from the gallery wall so that it becomes the centre of attention in your room.
Step Three: Arranging the Art
Now that you have the artwork and the perfect place to feature them as a gallery, it’s time to decide on their arrangement on the wall. This is arguably the most difficult part of the whole process as to how you arrange your artwork affects how it’s presented on the wall. A mistake in the arrangement can turn your new wall gallery into a cluttered mess. So take your time on this part.
These are just some examples of how you can arrange your new canvas art or acrylic prints on your wall. The ‘safest’ and easiest options are the ones with a clear symmetry, although asymmetrical arrangement can be just as effective when pulled off correctly.
You should also consider the levels of your new gallery. The individual pieces don’t necessarily have to be on the same level as the wall, especially if you’re featuring the gallery on an existing focal point. You can, for example, prop up smaller artwork on the mantelpiece of your fireplace. Doing this not only avoids cluttering the wall, but it also gives the finished gallery a more dynamic and three-dimensional appearance.
Step Four: Lighting
Providing ample lighting to your new gallery wall is the last step to turn your collection of art into a noteworthy focal point that looks it came out of an art museum. Since the gallery is housed in your living room or bedroom, your choice of lighting should be subtle as you don’t want to add any unnecessary heat in the space. You can go all the way with scones that direct light up the gallery space or hidden lighting that indirectly illuminates the space.