Is your gallery wall looking clustered, or far too busy? A busy wall leads to a busy mind and that heightens stress levels. That is not the comfortable environment that you would want in your living room.
Too many colours, patterns, and design changes are difficult for the eye. When creating eye appealing picture wall displays, it helps to have some uniformity.
To help tame what may feel like a wall display that is too dominant for the room, consider the following display tips…
Use picture frames with the same profiles
There are likely thousands of frame profile types. Metal and wood frames are the best for longevity, stability and protection. These can be patterned, coloured, stained, engraved, and with different widths.
Within a gallery wall, there can be photos framed in different sizes.
- A4 frames
- Several 11” x 14”
- A 24” x 20” as the centrepiece
- Multiple 8” x 10” frames
Assorted frame sizes are not a problem. Assorted frame profiles can be the issue that causes walls to look cluttered instead of organised.
As an example, if your centrepiece is a 24” x 20” wood frame in black with a 49mm wide frame profile finished with a gold trim, then surrounding that with a thinner 20mm oak veneer is likely to look at odds with the rest of your collection.
It would be much better to use similar frame profiles using either similar widths or colours to add uniformity.
Single-coloured tones on picture walls without a theme
As with photography or art, nothing is right or wrong. Everything is a personal preference. If you want to display family photos with fine art and some typographical art, there are no rules to say that you can’t. You’ll just have trouble doing too much without it looking chaotic.
A single trick you can use to tone down busy walls is to edit the images digitally to apply a greyscale or monochrome filter.
The greyscale filter strips out all colours and replaces them with varying shades of grey. Monochrome is typically black and white, but it is predominantly a single colour. The difference is that monochromatic images can be any single colour.
Take Sepia as an example. Those are all shades of yellow. It is still a monochrome effect and when applied to multiple pictures either displayed in a gallery wall or as a collection in a single multi photo frame, it adds uniformity to the colour scheme bringing balance to the collection.
Reduce the accessories surrounding your photo wall display
What surrounds a gallery display is just as important as what’s within it.
Even if you have used greyscale and kept your frame profiles similar, if what is around the display is overpowering, it will affect how the wall looks and the atmosphere it creates in the room.
Take for example an over the sofa wall display. It could be neutral, have plenty of balance using similar frame profiles, yet still feel overwhelming to look at when directly below it is a collection of cushions of different sizes and bright shades. The cushion collection could be overpowering the wall display directly above it.
Before making drastic changes to a wall display, take a step back and take in the photos, and every accessory within view. It may only require some items to be moved to make your wall display the focal point rather than the accessories surrounding it.