Happy long weekend everybody!  We had a rainy weekend here in Seattle and I’ve taken to organizing around my apartment.  This culminated in an impromptu gallery wall project which only took about 30 minutes to pull together.  It was much easier than I anticipated.  Over the years I’ve been slowly building a collection of poster art, etchings, paintings, and sketches.  As time or finances allowed, I’d get an additional frame or two (all black as the unifying feature) with various mattes and square/rectangular shapes.  This was my base to get started.  

Step 1.  THE SELECTION PROCESS Choose items to frame that have meaning to you or speak to you in some way.  If you have a series, consider taking 1 from the bunch to frame and hang.  In the example below, I have a set of puns from Seattle illustrator Frida Clements and it’s so hard to choose!  I went with “Oh Whale” but I can always swap it out at another point.  I have a variety of styles from various points in my life, each with a different story.  Take all the images you have ready to go and think about how they might be best arranged based on size, the number you have, and the area on your wall.  It might help to roughly sketch this out. 

Step 2.  LAY OUT THE WALL Either use a tape measure to measure out all your frames or hold the frames up to the wall and put little marks around the corners with painters tape.  I made little “L”s.  I kept the distance between each one fairly close but guesstimated (you could be really exact about this if you felt so inclined but I took the ‘lazier’ more relaxed approach with it, ahem…holiday weekend).  After I taped up each frame I would write a word in the bottom left corner of the tape that reflected which one it was meant to be.

Step 3. HANG EVERYTHING Home stretch now.  All you need to do is hang up all the frames and you’re done!  I added a little side piece here to help round it out and expand the corner section.  Grab a glass of wine and admire your handiwork.