I have this wall in my house that is sort of betwixt-and-between. It creates a sort of faux-hallway connecting my kitchen to my dining area and living room. I have been thinking for a long time that a salon-style display would be perfect. (You know, like in old European homes and museums, where frames of all kinds are hung close together, filling whole walls and showing off a huge amount of art all at once.) Even though this was clearly a great idea, I hadn't really gotten around to trying to do anything, so the wall had been unadorned...until last Christmas. I used the wall as a place to hang my holiday cards and a variety of winter/Christmas themed words cut out of fancy scrapbook papers.
That wall looked totally awesome and I loved it!
And then came mid- January, when I could no longer pretend that keeping my bright and cheery decorations up was cool with the world as a whole. (Ok, yeah. You're right. It might have been late January.) After the cards and the brightly colored words came down, the wall was just so....bland. I started thinking of things I could do with it and I finally decided that the jammed together look was actually a good one. You see the wall as you walk by it, but it faces in such a way that doing an old-world gallery/salon display wouldn't clutter up an actual room.
After deciding to do this cool project, I needed to decide what would go on this wall. I decided on two main utilitarian features: a whiteboard and a keyring holder (which I will describe in future posts). The I had to find the components for my wall: a wide variety of sizes and styles of picture frames.
The largest frame was for the whiteboard, and I got it and some others from my mom, who was cleaning out her house. A fancy-looking-but-made-of-plastic frame was purchased on clearance and with a coupon from Kohl's. And all the others were purchased for super-cheap from thrift stores. I just kept my eyes open for interesting designs, shapes, etc. Condition didn't matter so much, because I knew that I would be painting them. And what was in them was completely irrelevant because I wanted to put my own stuff in the frames, anyway. (The oval frame was a particularly good find, but it had a religious poem in it that had the store selling it as "art" and not just the frame.) The Kohl's frame was $6, but most were in the $1 to $1.50 range and I'm pretty sure that the most paid for any other frame was $3.00. Here they all are:
Once I had the frames, I needed to make them look like they belonged together. I thought about painting them all the same color, but then decided that wasn't the best option. Instead I purchased 3 different spray paints: a pale grey, a darker grey, and a metallic silver. The paint I used was a Rustoleum paint+primer that would stick to metal, wood, plastic, etc.
I took the frames apart, and for those that I couldn't get the glass out of, I covered the glass with paper and scotch tape.
I decided what color to paint each of the frames, then laid them out on a drop-cloth on my garage floor. And I opened the garage door, obviously.
I then spray painted the frames with 2 to 3 coats each. I tried to do light coats, but I'm not a super-proficient spray-painter at this point, so they were probably heavier than I should have done. I let them dry for a full day, then moved them inside and let them cure out some more.
Before I painted the frames, I cut paper shapes (out of old wrapping paper) for each. Then I used them to plan the set-up of the wall. Here's the plan, in situ:
After getting everything painted and planned, I purchased a variety of 3M Command picture hangers. They work sort of like locking velcro, but come off the walls and frames like the Command poster adhesives I used in college. The idea behind the purchase being that they would allow me to keep from putting tons and tons or holes in my wall. In addition, since they are supposed to be long-lasting, I should be able to take the frames down and change the imagery fairly frequently.
After getting the hangers up, it was October and time for Halloween decorations. So instead of putting regular photos and images in the frames, I put creepy artwork (including Munch's "Vampire," Delaroche's "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey," and Fuseli's "Nightmare"), an Edgar Allan Poe "Raven" excerpt, and some paper-crafted stuff (fangs, werewolf, Frankenstein, a black cat, etc.).
The final project is at the top of this blog post. My finished, custom gallery wall. I love it and it will be a great way of displaying photos, art prints/postcards gathered on museum visits, and other stuff that I want to be able to see and share.
