Designing a Gallery Wall

I’ve been collecting old windows and white frames for months now, thinking someday I’d like to do another gallery wall in our living room. And now that we have a huge, new wall in our living room I think it’s the perfect place for a gallery wall.

The wall is painted and ready for frames, but now that I’m in the process of designing a gallery wall I’m trying to figure out how I want to do it. Should I leave them empty, should I put pictures in them, maybe art in them??? So to get inspiration I headed to Pinterest.

I found a handful of images to give me some good inspiration for how to build my gallery. I love the huge frames in this gallery but it’s a little too much color for our house. Our TV will be a part of the gallery wall so I don’t want what’s in the frames to be too busy.

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I also love that in this gallery they used a huge letter. After seeing this I went on Ballard Designs and bought a big “M” for our wall. I had an “M” on the gallery wall in our other house but I love the size of this HUGE letter.

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I also really like this gallery wall. It’s much smaller than mine will be but I like that it mixes frames with nothing drawn in them and frames with some light sketches in them. I also love the colors because the gray, white and mix of metal, are similar to what’s in my living room

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This last picture gave me a great idea for how I could include images in my frames. I love the idea of having something in some of my frames but I knew I didn’t want to add too much color and busy-ness to the wall. So when I found this picture I thought the sketches were a great idea! I love how there are so many frames on this wall but it doesn’t look too busy because the sketches aren’t too distracting, but they are still very beautiful.

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Unfortunately I’m not an artist but lucky for me my 16 year old daughter is a very talented artist. The next question was what do I have her sketch??? On Facebook I had asked my readers about whether or not I should fill the frames, or leave them empty, and one of my readers gave me a fabulous idea. She said I should fill the frames with images that represent each of us in the family. It makes the gallery wall personal but also leads to conversation about what each of the images represents and why we picked them. I thought that was a fantastic idea so I commissioned my 16 year old to sketch images that each of us picked.

Here are some of the images she sketched for our gallery wall.

 

I can’t wait to put the sketches in the frames and get them all hung! Stay tuned, reveal coming next week…