Gallery Wall: Children's Art Prints

In the Mac & Ink households, blank walls have definitely been a staple. But when Ink and I moved to our new places, gallery walls were on the top of our must have lists.

I've got a couple of them in mind for my place - and here's the first one:

Children’s Art Prints

Designing my daughter’s room, I wanted it to be bright and cheery, a happy and inviting place for the little girl to play and sleep in. While hunting for décor that fit the theme of the room, I found these adorable prints from Trafalgar’s Square on Etsy.  These animal prints are so cute they make me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Buying the prints was easy but actually framing them and getting them hung up was a bit (actually a lot) of a pain. A lot of effort went into getting end result I wanted.

Perfect fit or with a profile?

I wanted to have borders for these as I thought it would add some interest to the overall picture. 

Store bought or custom framed?

My first thought was to get them custom framed but  was a bit apprehensive about which framer to go to having a not so good experience with the framer a few years back. I also thought it would cost more. 

So on one of our Ikea runs, Ink convinced me to get ready-made frames and mount them myself. Unfortunately, the Ikea frames only came with a profile for A4 sized art but my prints were 8R and that put in an extra run to the stationary store and a solid hour of ‘crafting’.

In retrospect, it would have been much less effort and only a tad more expensive to have had them custom framed as I eventually found a reliable and reasonably priced framer.

Arrangement?

Having the framing out of the way, the next step was to decide on the layout of the gallery wall and its placement on the wall.  I planned how I wanted the layout of the gallery wall to look like by first trying out the arrangement on the floor. 

Satisfied with the arrangement, I measured the spacing of the frames and then transferred the measurements onto the wall by cutting out the shapes on pieces of tracing paper and sticking them on the wall first. This may look like wasted effort but I'm really glad I did because it made it all so easy for the hubby to measure the location of the nail. 

Make a hole in the wall?

The hubby and I agonised a little over this. No one wants holes in their walls, but in the end we decided safety came first and opted to go with nails as it would give us some peace of mind that the framed pictures would not fall, break and cause any injury to the little girl.

Finally…..

Here are the prints all framed up. Worth every bit of effort don’t you think?