A few thoughts about gallery walls

We've currently set up two different gallery walls in this house, and two very different approaches went into each one. And although I'm no expert on much of anything, especially gallery walls, I wanted to share some of that thought process.

In the fall, we put up a wall of photos I took of some of my favorite places and buildings around town. Because they were all pictures of the same town, we wanted a more uniformed look for the wall. We made all of the photos black and white and got the same white frames for them all.

 

 

For the gallery wall we just put up in the family room, though, we had a completely different approach. The huge world map in above our couch was starting to bug me. I love the map, don't get me wrong, but all the empty space around it was taking away from the map's effect. The original plan had been to surround the big map with smaller maps of places that were meaningful to us, but it became too hard a task to find the maps I needed. (I gave up. I'll be honest.) So it was time to fill that space. With whatever I could find.

I got spontaneous on a snow day with the hubs last week and went through our whole house grabbing whatever frames I could find and spare (most of which were still in boxes in our spare room) and spread them out on the family room floor. Because I wanted to have frames on both sides of the large map, I divided the big group of frames into two small groups of frames, one for each side of the map. To decide what would go where, I looked only at the frames. We changed most of the pictures from inside the frames anyway, but the most important part for me was that the variety of frames spanning the wall seemed balanced. Not all the black on one side, little ones spread out, etc. Here's the finished product:

Here's the breakdown for each side: 

-each side has one frame that was bigger than the rest

-each side has a rough, weathered wood frame

-each side has a small frame

-each side has a metallic-looking frame (one is silver and one is gold)

-each side has at least one piece of artwork (either mine or from Etsy)

And because the frames are balanced out nicely, all we had to do was figure out the layout we wanted and spend some time on Shutterfly to fill the frames with some new pictures. Here's each side close up:

The beauty of this gallery wall, as opposed to the one in the kitchen, is that it can and will grow and evolve over time. It works for now the way it is, but there's also plenty of room on both sides to add frames and fill in the rest of the wall space as we collect more pictures, prints, and frames. We knew we didn't want to ever add to the kitchen gallery wall, so it fills the wall and it all matches perfectly. With this wall, though, we never have to worry about a specific frame going out of stock or having to maintain some kind of theme with what's inside the frames. It's all random and different which means it has the freedom to grow over time pretty easily. 

Both types of gallery walls are great and I love both of the ones in our house. I love them for different reasons, but I'm really happy with both of them.