So today I am (finally!) sharing some interiors content from our new flat! We moved in just over 2 months ago and since then we’ve been trying to get the decor sorted out which is actually pretty difficult when you work full time! But one of the first things we did was buy prints for 2 gallery walls in the living room.
It was actually quite a complicated process planning it out – much more time consuming than I thought it would be! So I thought I’d share how I planned out our gallery walls and my tips for curating prints/artwork for them.
Find Inspiration
The first step in planning a gallery wall is to have a look around online and see what kind of thing you want to go for. Do you want the wall to have a theme for example; whether that be by colour, genre of photo or just something random. I think it’s also good to have a look around to see what kind of shape you’d like the gallery to be in and how others have styled the space around it.
The obvious place to start is Pinterest – I have quite a few gallery wall images saved on my Living Room Interiors board if you fancy a look there. Otherwise, if you just search ‘gallery wall’ on there you’ll find a lot of inspiration. Another place I looked was Desenio, which was actually the place I ordered my prints from. They have a really useful ‘inspiration’ section on their website with lots of ideas.
Bookmark your favourite prints
This is the fun part! After you’ve got a good idea of the kind of gallery wall you’d like to create, start browsing for the prints you’d like to have in it. There are so many places you can buy prints now: Desenio, Etsy, Society6 to name a few. My tip would be to have a good look through different websites and bookmark any that you like.
Before you buy any, I’d recommend looking through the ones you’ve bookmarked and see if they all go together the way you like. Also, it’s worth checking what sizes the prints are available in, because a lot of the time they are only available in 1-2 different sizes.
Find a gallery template
You don’t have to do this next step, but I found it so useful when planning out our gallery wall. Desenio have some really great templates that you can use to plan out how to arrange your prints. They have different ones for the size of the space – we went with a large template because we had quite large areas to fill.
Plan out the arrangement
This next step is something I found so helpful when planning our gallery wall. After selecting a template, I planned out how the gallery would look with Photoshop. I took a screenshot of the template and used that as the basis, then took screenshots of the prints I had bookmarked earlier and pasted them into the template so that I could see how it would look.
I think it’s really useful to do this (even if it is a bit time consuming) because I found that a lot of the prints I had chosen didn’t actually go together, so it took quite a bit of trial and error to get the arrangement right.