Coming up with a Plan for your Wall Art
Good planning prevents wall damage and ensures your photographs and other wall art are displayed and enjoyed most effectively. Walk through the spaces and note the walls with the best potential for photograph and other wall art placement. Experience each space and note the activities and atmosphere. Is the room to be restful, or full of activity?
A room plan and wall elevations are helpful to show traffic flow, placement of furnishings, and the location of windows and doors. The larger the drawing the better. Using graph paper and the scale of ½” or two graph squares to 1 foot can make it very easy to create the drawing to scale. Use blue prints or carefully measure each wall, door, and window. Note lamp and plant placements. With accurate measurements and correct proportions you will be able to determine the size, number and placement for wall art pieces.
Next, create rectangular cutouts in various sizes, scaled proportionally to the sizes of the actual photographs and other wall art. Move the cutouts around on your drawn-to-scale wall elevations. If in doubt about the best scale, cut out pieces of newspaper, corresponding to the full size of the photos and wall art in your design. Using painters tape, tape them to various locations on the walls, then stand back and observe the effect.
In general, it is a good idea to have the horizontal center line of a single photograph or group of photographs at almost eye level. This is at a height from the floor of 60-64”, depending on size, and a bit lower if the art is mostly viewed from a sitting position.
Hang small wall art pieces where people can get up close to view them. Conversely, hang large wall art pieces where people can stand back and take in the entire piece.
Wall Art Alignment
Wall art alignment is an important aspect of good interior design layout. The way photographs and wall art line up with each other and overall to the wall will determine whether your design works or not. The idea is to achieve an overall unity, balance and flow to the fine art images.
Photographs and other wall art can be aligned and connect walls that span the corner of a room. Generally line up the middle of the group with each other so they all seem to flow in one line.
On a single wall, generally the top or bottom edge of pictures with the same orientation, e.g., horizontal, should align with each other. Groupings of photographs can have several areas where alignment occurs. See the examples below.
Larger pictures in the center of groupings can anchor a grouping and give the feeling of stability. Build out different sized wall art grouping arrangements from the center.
In art groupings, the sizes of photos, orientation and diversity of views on a subject can all be combined to create variety and a visually interesting story.
Hallways, stairways, corridors and other long walls lend themselves to photography and wall art arranged using one sweeping line of alignment. For stairways, wall art grouping could either mirror the triangle shape of stairs or climb the wall stair-step style (moving the art higher with each picture as you follow the stairs up) .
If pictures in wall art groupings are the same size, the visual “breathing space” between them should be constant. Smaller pictures can be hung closer together than large ones. Avoid spacing photos and wall art too far apart and winding up with dead wall space. Ten to fifteen inches or so between large prints with an overall size of 30” x 40” is a good rule of thumb. If the wall art is to be a grouped into a grid of columns and rows, a tighter spacing of a few inches is recommended.
There are a variety of ways to deal with large and high wall spaces. Putting up a collage or grid of wall art as mentioned above is one of them.
Another great unifier is color. It can bring together subjects that tell a story.
A great addition to any collage or wall art grid is dimension. Most artwork is rectangular and flat, but by adding a wall sconce with a candle, masks, scultural art pieces, a hanging glass container, even a mirror or clock can bring added dimension, color and movement to a static display.
The object is to arrive at a wall art design that is balanced and gives the impression of unity.
Visual Balance for Wall Art
Visual balance is the guiding principle of alignment. Balance is a sense of visual equilibrium amoung the various wall art elements of the arrangement. There are two types of balance: formal and informal.
Formal Balance uses shapes of equal number, size and weight on each side of an imaginary vertical line to create symmetry. Often the right and left sides from the imaginary vertical line are mirrored shapes of each other.
Informal Balance is based on the idea the “collective weight” of all the wall art shapes and sizes balances overall. The number, shape and sizes of wall art elements vary, with no hard and fast rules. Large wall art pieces are balanced by a number of smaller pieces. Alignment points vary, but still help to connect and balance the various wall art elements in the series or group.
Experiment balancing wall art in areas by creating a dynamic interaction of shapes and sizes. Using the scaled wall diagrams and paper cutouts mentioned earlier, is a great way of trying out arrangements, without putting holes in your walls!
Another great way of experimenting with layout and checking what actually works best is to lay the fine art on the floor to get a feel for what seems right. You can write down the art pieces positioning and spacing to replicate up on the wall. Doing this in front of the wall where the work will be displayed also allows you to see how the light will affect the visibility and color of the wall art.
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