My First Wall Collage

One thing I was certain of even before we moved into our new house - I knew I wanted the walls of our living space to be exclusively adorned with VanGogh prints. Not only is he a fellow migraineur  but I could spend hours on end looking at his paintings, in fact I have. I never tire of their presence.

I put these two on the wall shortly after moving in, simply to have something up on that wall. Nothing worse than white walls with nothing hanging.

I'm talking about the two images on the far wall - they clearly don't belong on this wall and don't belong next to each other. With some time I also came to realize that they actually don't even belong in this room. This is when I decided that I wanted to do a collection of images on this wall. Years ago I had picked up a book of frameable VanGogh prints in anticipation of the day I would want to hang them. That day has come.

Being a complete newbie to wall collages I was feeling pretty intimidated at first. What does a type A personality do in such situations? The answer is simple - lots of careful thought and planning. Here are the steps I took: 

1st - I picked out the images I wanted to use.

2nd - I bought one frame and one mat and framed one of the images to make sure I liked it.

3rd - I used this frame to create 6 paper templates of the exact right size.

4th - I then taped the paper templates to the wall and moved them around until I felt like I had found the perfect layout. 

5th - Now certain about the whole idea I bought the rest of the frames and mats. 

6th - While placing the images behind the mats I discovered that a couple of my images were too small to fit into the mat opening so I had to switch them out for other images. Thankfully I love all of the VanGogh prints so it was no big deal to switch them out. However, I was pretty surprised that since all the images were in the same book that they were not more uniform. 

7th - I then spent hours measuring, marking, checking and double checking to make sure everything was level as I hung them. You see each frame required two nails and the little tabs that they hung from were not all in the same place so it hanging them took A LOT of time.

Well worth it. I love how it draws your eye upward and helps to showcase the vaulted ceiling. One of the images needs to be moved about 1/4" to the right but I haven't yet decided if it bothers me enough to try and fix it. My husband says that he doesn't notice it and doubts others will. I guess I'll find out next weekend when we have some family over.

Now I don't feel like it is quite complete. A big part of me thinks adding one more horizontal image as an offshoot to the right of the collage would make the whole thing feel a little more complete. That space above the TV needs the attention, don't you think? For now this will have to do. I need some time to recover from yesterday's lengthy hanging session. Plus, other projects need my attention as I prepare for visitors.