Do you have a blank wall in your home staring you in the face, begging you to take the reigns and do something about it? Instead of attempting to fill the space with one large object, try several…its' cheaper!
Your local Dollar or 99cent Stores sell frames of 8×10 size and smaller, in a wide variety of styles. Get your photo printer plugged in, and start printing. Once you have a small collection of prints ready for framing go and find several frames of the same style, or in the same color but different styles and in various sizes. If you can't find enough of the same color or same style (or if you like a bit more variety), pick 2 colors and purchase an approximately equal number of both. When you arrange them, try and balance them out equally, so that one color doesn't weigh more heavily in any one area than the other.
Note: If you plan to scatter your frames in an asymmetrical pattern along your wall or if you plan to lay them out in anything that is NOT a perfectly grid-like pattern (or even if a perfect grid is what you desire) – I offer you a strategy: Use a large piece of butcher paper or craft paper, of an approximately equal size to the area of concentration on your wall. Trace the approximate shape of the area in question onto the paper so you have some guidelines. Lay the paper out on your floor and arrange the frames on the paper, inside your guidelines, in any pattern that you like (this allows you to arrange and rearrange, without putting hundreds of tiny holes in your wall). Once you have them arranged on your paper perfectly, trace the outline of each frame with a pencil or pen. Remove the frames from the paper and place on an area of your floor in the approximate same pattern and order.
Tape your paper onto the area of your wall this arrangement will hang. Then begin hammering small nails or picture hanging apparatuses right through the paper in the appropriate area of each traced frame. Once you have all of your nails in place, carefully untape the paper and remove it, leaving the nails in the wall (the paper will rip around the nail heads). Now you are ready to hang those frames, and they should be sitting in relatively the same arrangement you will be placing them on the wall…no guesswork and easy as pie! Scattered throughout this article are a few patterns I drew up, feel free to use them or let them help you get your creative juices flowing for your own arrangements…Be creative, there are no right answers here! This is mainly about proportion and not so much about the arrangement itself. If it feels balanced to you, then that is all that matters!
