Maintain visual balance throughout your wall. Even if I had been given the dimensions, they might have been too big or to small for my three foot by five foot space.
You have your layout; now you need to decide which photos or art pieces to put in your layout. Choose pictures with colors that complement each other as well as the decor in the room you are decorating.
If you want to build a model like I did, but you don't have Microsoft Excel or some other software that you can use, then you can also do this on paper. There are generally three ways to approach the layout specifics:
To come up with my detailed layout, I started with a picture of a gallery wall that I had found on Pinterest. Use one sheet as your canvas (or tape multiple sheets together, if you need a larger space), and then cut "picture frames" of the appropriate sizes from the other sheets. Try to stay patient with the process! Arrange the frames to your liking, and once you're satisfied, tape or glue them down, or just trace them out on your canvas.
Decide which photos or art pieces you want to display, and then decide how to lay them out on your wall.
Arranging Your Gallery Wall Layout
Selecting Your Gallery Wall Content
If your layout calls for large pictures and you don't have a piece in the corresponding size, you can use a mat around a smaller picture to fill the space.
For my gallery wall, I used the last approach. If you designed your gallery wall using the first approach -- choosing your pieces and then designing the layout -- then you've already completed this step and you're done! Otherwise, you now have to figure out what to put in each frame of your layout. I resized the cells on a worksheet until they were small squares. For example, if you are using photographs of people, such as family photos, you might have a mix of individual shots (photos of just one person) and group shots (photos of the whole family). Sometimes you can find pictures of layouts that tell you exactly what picture frame sizes were used, but that wasn't true in this case. For scaling purposes, I considered each square to be a 1x1 square inch on my wall. I did this on my computer, using Microsoft Excel. Then I created rectangular shapes using the shape tool, being careful to make sure they were properly scaled -- i.e., to represent an 8x10 picture frame with a 1" border, I created a shape that took up 10 squares by 12 squares on my grid.
. I had a few pieces that I knew I wanted to include -- although even then, I was flexible regarding the printed size of those pieces -- but mostly I was just interested in creating a layout that I liked.
The next task I would recommend is to very specifically design the layout that you want to use. If so, then consider trying to spread the two types of pictures out so that you don't have all the group shots clustered in one place within your gallery.
Now you have your gallery wall space, a general idea of the shape that your overall gallery will take, and an idea of the style in which you want to hang the pictures.
Decide on a layout you like that fits your space, and choose photo or art pieces that fit the layout.
A combination of the two, i.e., choose a few photos or art pieces you want to display; design a layout that will feature those pieces but also includes additional pieces; choose more photos or art pieces to fill in the gaps.
Consider the colors you are using
