How to Create a Gallery Wall

After sharing our guest bedroom reveal & sharing a lot of mirror selfies or try ons from our guest room, I noticed more & more questions coming in about our art wall in this space. We went back & forth with what to do on this wall & we are so happy with our decision to create a salon style, eclectic gallery wall here! It makes us so happy & there are so many fun, statement pieces that mean a lot to us, help us remember trips we’ve taken, or inspire us. Today, I am sharing my tips on how to create a gallery wall for any of you who are wanting to do something similar!

How To Create A Gallery Wall

Below I am sharing some easy tips on how to create a gallery wall for your home & some things that I learned along the way when doing ours. I’m linking all of the prints & frames that I can at the bottom of this post for you all to shop if you want!

Pick A Wall

First things first on my tips for how to create a gallery wall is to decide where you want your gallery wall to go. This will impact how many pieces you’ll need, size of frames, & a general plan. Knowing where your gallery wall will be will influence every step that comes next, so it’s important to pick one & stick to it from the beginning.

Choose Your Style

Next, choose your style. You may want an entirely black & white gallery wall. You may want one of old family portraits, places you have traveled, or a mix of things that inspire you. If you are creating a gallery wall for your office, the theme or style will be totally different than if you are making one for a kids room. Keep this in mind to guide you throughout the whole process.

Develop a Plan

Once you have chosen the wall you are going to use, develop a plan for your gallery wall. How to create a gallery wall on a wall going up the stairs will be completely different than a gallery wall above a bed or on an entire wall like ours. There are a few different types of gallery walls you can do: linear, grid, or salon style. Each of which has totally different vibes. Develop a plan for how you envision your gallery wall. This will give you an idea of what you’ll need going forward.

Collect your Pieces

I personally think a curated wall that has a collected feel is better than just going online one day & ordering a bunch of random pieces at once. I look at sites with prints often & save some of my favorites, so I can go back & revisit them as I need more art around the home. I also keep some meaningful photos from travel on hand that I want to frame or use. However you approach it, get your pieces together that you want to use.

Plan your Colors

Once you have your prints decided upon, start to think about frame colors. I wanted to keep ours neutral, so I went with a few black frames, a few whites ones, then mixed in a few natural & metallic. I think the key here is to pick some that compliment one another. On those that we matted, we used a white mat, but on some of them we included a double mat with other colors to further tie every thing together.

Splurge on Framing

One trick for how to create a gallery wall on a budget is to buy some prints online on affordable sites (I love Society 6) & then get them custom framed. I used a local framer or Framebridge. A nice frame can make anything from an iPhone photo you took on the fly to a picture painted by your four year old to a one of a kinda print look all the more elevated. If you are going to use a simple, less expensive frame, stick to classics like black with a white mat or white with a white mat. A few of ours are more affordable from Amazon & mixing those in on a larger wall with more expensive ones makes it balanced & saves a little.

Plan Out How You’ll Hang Your Frames

There are two ways to plan out how you are going to hang your photos. You can do one or combine them both. The first is to measure out the size of your wall or area you’ll be hanging your gallery wall on the floor. Mark it off with tape, objects, or whatever you can to ensure that you know what area you’re working with. Then, you can arrange your framed photos on the floor to get a plan of where they are going to go. I think this is especially helpful if you are doing a salon-style arrangement like we did. If you want to do the below, you can, or you can skip ahead to the next step/tip below.

If you want to know how to create a gallery wall that is a grid style, it can be really helpful to cut out large pieces of construction paper the size of each of your frames. Then, you can use tape to hang them up on the wall. This will help you make sure you have them spaced evenly, which is key for a grid wall. You can mark where all of your hangers or wires are on the paper & then go ahead & put your nails or picture hangers in the wall. You can tear the paper down & put the framed photos on the wall easily this way!

Lining Them Up

How you line up your frames depends on what kind of gallery wall you are doing. Since our gallery wall is a full empty wall & we did a salon style arrangement, we wanted to ensure all the outer edges of the frames were even. We didn’t focus too much on spacing between all of the photos because the edges lined up. We tried to keep it where just a few inches at the max were between the edges of the frames. We also took ours all the way down to the floor, which is a feature I love about it. We stopped it at the top of the door frames, but you could also take one like this all the way up to the ceiling!

If you are doing a linear wall, start with the middle print & build around it. Your spacing doesn’t have to be perfect on a linear wall. You can either line up the edges or try to keep relatively similar spacing between frames, but you don’t necessarily have to do both.

If you are doing a gallery wall, you’ll want to be sure that there is even spacing between each of the frames so it’s cohesive. They should all line up both vertically and horizontally!

Don’t Overthink It!

If one doesn’t work, just rehang it. I hope no one ever goes behind our frames, because there are a quite a few extra holes. I just started going for it & wasn’t too worried about it. A way to avoid this is to use the above tips, but honestly a few holes in the wall don’t bother me. Should we want to take it down one day, we’ll just patch them.

My biggest tip when it comes to how to create a gallery wall is don’t overthink it. If you love the pieces & love how they are framed, you’ll love the end result. We honestly didn’t overly plan our wall. We picked pieces that we love, framed them, & balanced them out as needed. I didn’t want three white photo frames in a row, so I spread them out. You have to go with what feels good & looks good to you!

>Related: Guest Bedroom Reveal

I hope this post was helpful if you are looking for tips on how to create a gallery wall. It’s such a fun project & we absolutely love ours! It brings a smile to our faces every day. If you have any other additional questions, please feel free to reach out! I am here to help however I can. I am linking all of the prints & frames that I can for you all to shop below. For more home content, be sure to check out my cloffice reveal, our bathroom remodel, & our master bedroom reveal. XO