Next month we’ll have been in this house for two years. That actually doesn’t seem possible but if there’s one thing this last few months has taught me, it’s that time can be pretty damn stretchy.

Take Lockdown. So much has happened, at times it doesn’t feel like it’s possible that it’s only been three months since Covid-19 rocked into all our lives and changed everything. It feels like it’s been a lifetime since things were ‘normal’ and I’m not sure they’ll ever be the same again. In some ways, that’s no bad thing. I’ve learned a lot. The pace of life has slowed down so much and in many ways that’s been a blessing. We’re also much more grateful for what we have and for this house we’ve made a home – it’s been our safe haven during all of this craziness.

Like most childless furloughed people, we’ve had a bit more time on our hands of late and I wanted to make some progress on a few interiors projects. Over the last two years, I’ve been plotting and planning a gallery wall project and during lockdown we finally bit the bullet and started hanging one – well more than one, actually – we now have three, in various stages of completion.

I shared some pics on Instagram during the week of the beginnings of two of our gallery walls and without sounding like one of those stereotypical Insta twats, I have been getting quite a lot of questions about how we approached it (particularly after Print Club London shared one of my snaps on their Instagram feed and it racked up over 2,000 likes in 24 hours – thanks guys!)

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog (the last one was about my Christmas garlands, eek) and this project has been a bit of a labour of love. So, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned/a few tips we’ve picked up along the way.

Curate your Collection

Art can be pretty subjective and the even the word ‘art’ can sound a bit wanky and potentially off putting to some. The truth is, art is whatever you want it to be. It doesn’t have to be a Monet, Hockney or Hirst to be art. With our budget, we were never going to be splashing big cash on expensive pieces of art in the traditional sense but we did want some distinctive pieces that would add some personality to our home and break up the 50 shades of white and grey.

Personally, I’m drawn to colour and in some cases, typography in artwork, if the message resonates. I’m not an Eat, Pray, Love or Live, Laugh, Love kinda gal (it’s totally fine if you are btw) but I do tend to buy pieces that I feel a connection to for one reason or another – and that I like the look of, of course.

Prints and screenprints in particular make up the majority of our collection to date. Screenprinting is a really fascinating technique to watch - if you haven’t seen it in action, look up some videos on Instagram, Pinterest or YouTube. Essentially, coloured ink is layered on top of each other in set patterns on a printing press. There are some brilliant, very talented printmakers across Ireland and the UK. You can also pick up some really affordable limited edition prints too, so it’s a great way to buy original art without breaking the bank.

I’ll maybe do another blog on some of my favourite artists and print shops sometime but I’ll include a little list with links at the end for starters, in case you’re interested in any of the pieces you see. In all honesty, I found most of the artists and pieces you’ll see on our walls via Instagram – either shared by the artists themselves; discovered by searching hashtags; or through seeing shares from people I follow/whose homes I like the style of. Both Instagram and Pinterest are great places for inspiration and discovering artists and I hope I can share the love a little too – there’s no doubt this pandemic has been tough on the creative community and independent artists, stores and galleries need all the support they can get.

Anything Goes

In other parts of our house, I’ve agonised over where to hang a specific picture or print but I knew that our main gallery wall in our hallway was always going to be a real mish mash of colours and styles. The great thing about gallery walls is there are no rules. It’s all down to personal taste and you don’t have to match anything, or you can, it’s totally your call.

We have everything from large colourful screenprints to smaller A4, A5, even postcard sized pieces. We have actual postcards from trips away, birthday cards, a few wedding photos (though we’re wearing Daft Punk helmets in both of them, so they’re not the typical shots we have elsewhere in the house) and also some framed wrapping paper, which is a great filler. Shout out to Oliver Bonas for their quirky hot sauce wrapping that looks great against a dark mount. Paperchase also have some great wrapping paper that would work well for this type of thing.

I was also given a beautiful book of postcards from the owner of iconic Belfast pubs, The Duke of York, Harp Bar and The Dark Horse. It features embossed typography led prints featuring the words of Irish poets and wordsmiths from Seamus Heaney and W.B. Yeats right through to Gary Lightbody. They’re stunning. I’ve framed three of them so far but will add more in time, as we add more art to the walls.

The common thread is colour, with a few more understated pieces to break things up. The décor here is various shades of white and grey and monochrome (with an added eyesore of a stripy grey/brown/beige carpet – more on that another day but you’ll see what I mean from the pic below). I wanted the artwork to pop and provide a bit of interest and colour in this space, which is the first thing you see when you walk into our house.

Your preference might be a fully monochrome set of prints, or a more neutral palette. There’s no right or wrong, it’s just what works for you.

In the smaller gallery wall, we’ve started in our dining room, the colour palette is much more muted. This is already quite a colourful room, with two different shades of blue on the walls, so a pastel scheme, with a few pops of brighter colours works better in here, well, I think so anyway.

In the Frame

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that the wonderful Lisa Dawson (A.K.A. the queen of gallery walls) inspired this particular project. It was her floor to ceiling beauty that runs up alongside her staircase that inspired me to put together our hallway gallery wall.

Lisa did a great IGTV at the end of March (watch it here), which gave me the nudge I needed. In it, she talked about just biting the bullet and framing things yourself. I was getting myself a bit hung up on the idea of getting everything professionally framed but if I was going to do that, it would be years before I could afford to get everything done and up on the walls. Lisa gave me the confidence to take on some of the framing myself.

Of course, if you have a really special piece of art or an heirloom, if it’s a huge piece, or a peculiar shape/size that an off the shelf frame won’t work for, then proper professional framing is advised. But the idea that art is better framed in any frame and up on your wall, rather than sitting in a pile in the corner of a room really resonated with me and gave me the push I needed to get started.

I had quite a stash of frames in the garage already and was able to pick up a few more in supermarket shops and a few quick runs into DIY/home stores as they’ve reopened in recent weeks. I’ll include a bit more info on this at the end but I have frames from everywhere. My go-to ones are from B&M Bargains but I have some from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, The Range and Sostrene Grene – anywhere I see them with a decent mount included, basically.

Mounts are important as they keep the art/print from sticking to the glass. They also give the art a bit of space to breathe/make them more impactful, I feel. And, in the case of a gallery wall, it does no harm to have bigger frames to fill more space – so I have framed smallish pieces in bigger frames to create the illusion of larger pieces.

I also bought some mounting card a while back from a local art supplies store and where I had pieces that were smaller than the mount window, I stuck them to the card with double sided tape, or doubled up masking tape before mounting and framing them, which worked pretty well. Masking tape is also useful for attaching your prints to the mounts at the back, so they stay put!

As for the style and colour of frame, that really does come down to personal choice. Our interiors style is a bit of a Dolly Mixture with modern/minimalist with Scandi influences, mixed with vintage/mid century pieces. For framing, I tend to veer towards simple, modern narrow frames, primarily in black and white as I think they let the art do the talking. That being said, our main gallery wall features a few gold frames with dark mounts and even one yellow one that I really liked for one of our colourful wedding snaps.

I also really like simple, natural plywood frames and we have a couple of natural light oak frames in our mini gallery wall in the dining room, mixed with white. As I say, the style and colour just comes down to personal preference and what suits your space best – there is no wrong or right.

Plot it Out

You don’t have to do this part but I am pretty methodical when it comes to these things and found it really helpful to visualise where the pieces would go. We had two particularly big pieces that had been properly professionally framed – a limited edition screenprint by artist Jordan Robertson called 1974 (the focus of the Print Club London Instagram post) and another limited edition screenprint by the amazing Dave Buonaguidi with ‘PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999’ in his signature fluro neon pink typeface over a dazzling red glitter backdrop, which was part of a collaboration with the Affordable Art Fair and Jealous London last year. I wanted these pieces to really stand out and as they were the largest pieces, I wanted to arrange them in a way that smaller pieces would surround them.

I laid them out on the floor first to think about the placement. But then I realised that I needed to think about the way it would look on the actual wall. I had kept a lot of the paper inserts from the frames, so I started sticking them to the wall, writing on each one which piece would go where. For the larger pieces, I patched together and folded newspaper in the approximate shape and stuck them to the wall with masking tape. I then took a good step back to make sure I was happy with the placement, before we set about putting them up on the wall.

In our smaller gallery wall in the dining room, I laid the pieces out on the floor and just marked out the piece I wanted to be in the centre to check that I could fit the next piece above it and then we got cracking with hanging them.

Just Hang the Blimming Stuff!

All that’s left at this stage is to hang the stuff. Just do it! I wish we had done ours sooner and everytime I look at it now, I think, ‘why didn’t you do this ages ago?’ It brings a smile to my face every single day.

One of the main questions I’ve been asked on Instagram is around hanging/fixings. I have only used Command strips once and in doing so, I managed to pull a huge chunk of paint and plaster off the wall of our spare room, so I’m not a fan. Lots of people have messaged me with similar tales too. I know a lot of people love them, and if they work for you, great but they’re not for me. I really would advise against using them for anything heavy or valuable though. Sometimes professional framing can cost more than the art, so the last thing you want is for a picture to fall off the wall and smash. 

All of our pictures have been hung with nails, or with proper fixings screwed into the walls. A week on, everything’s still on the wall, so we’re pretty happy! We have a couple of picture hanging sets – one from Ikea and another from B&Q and they have everything you need in them.

It’s better if you can hang art on a solid wall brick/concrete rather than a stud/partition wall but you can get different fixings for stud walls too. If you knock on the wall and it sounds solid, it probably is. If it sounds hollow, it’s likely a partition wall and little more than plasterboard, so you’ll need to be careful not to hang anything super heavy.

If you have a solid wall and you can, use proper, permanent fixings, particularly for larger pieces - to ensure they’re secured. Drill a hole, use a wall plug and screw. Our father in law gave us a demo and it’s really not that difficult and nothing to be afraid of. There are loads of YouTube tutorials you can watch too. Strong string fixings on the back of large pictures are also much safer – they will usually come back from a professional framers’ like this but you can also do this yourself. For smaller pieces, we’ve used the sturdier of the small nails in the picture hanging kits and just hammered them in the wall.

Before you drill holes or hammer any nails in, check where the fixing is in the back and make sure you measure down and make a mark at the point you want the fixing - don’t put the hole where you want the top of the frame to be, if the fixing is a third of the way down the frame.

Some people have said to me that they’re a bit squeamish about hammering nails/making loads of holes in walls. I get it. Particularly if you’ve spent a long time decorating. But even if we made a mistake, we were always going to be covering it up. The wall running along our stairs wasn’t the smoothest either, so it’s actually covered a multitude of sins. We also likely won’t see these holes again until we maybe move house and d’ya know what? It won’t be our problem then!

There’s a little timelapse video of Dom and I hanging our gallery wall in my ‘Gallery Wall’ highlight over on Instagram, if you’re so inclined - you’ll find me at @SineadDoyle.

if you’re feeling daunted about getting started, don’t. We have far from finished any of our gallery walls. They’re all works in progress and I expect they will change and evolve too. As you can see from the picture below (taken from upstairs), we have about the same space again to fill above what’s currently on the wall. But it’s a start and that’s the main thing. The pressure is off now and we can add to it as we go - it’s a foundation to build on.

So, that’s it. I’ll leave some useful links below. Feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you think, or connect with me on social, if you have any questions.

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written here. Six month absences seem to have been pretty common on this blog. I will try to do better. I have a good few more interiors projects on the go, which I may return to write about soon. Just don’t hold your breath waiting – I have form…

Shop my Gallery Walls/Useful Links:

Print Shops/Galleries/Lifestyle Stores

• Print Club London – a brilliant screenprinting studio and online shop in Dalston, London, specialising in affordable, limited edition screenprints.

• East End Prints – a cool little print shop and gallery on Brick Lane in London – some really affordable prints, plus some cool special/limited editions.

• Underway Studio – an illustration & printmaking collective based in London. In normal times, they run workshops and I’d love to go to one someday. I bought some of their fab collage kits as a lockdown project and hope to add a few of my own creations to our gallery wall soon. These would make great gifts too.

• Jealous London – a contemporary gallery, print publisher and printing studio, based in East London's creative hub of shoreditch, with Jealous North in Crouch End.

• BTS Concept Store – if you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know this is one of my favourite interiors stores. Based in Coleraine on the North Coast. Tracy always has a lovely selection of prints and I’ve bought several from her over the last few years. She also has a great online shop.

• Maven – another gorgeous, eclectic interiors and homewares store, based just off the Lisburn Road in Belfast. They stock Caman & Co Irish county prints - we have the Antrim and Clare ones for our respective home counties and we love them.

• Linen and Latte – a lovely little local lifestyle store and café close to where we live, just outside Belfast.

• Oklahoma Manchester – I have just ordered two cute and colourful 2BMCR prints from this eclectic interiors store in Manchester. They have some really quirky stuff, so they’re well worth a look.

• I would love to invest in a piece from the Belfast Print Workshop or Belfast Exposed gallery in time too – I will be keeping an eye as they hopefully reopen soon.

Just a few Artists of Note:

• Adam Bridgland – I have four of Adam’s pieces, including the ‘My Favourite Colour is Rainbow’ print that has proven very popular, prompting lots of questions in my Instagram DMs. It will always remind me of this strange, strange time. During lockdown, he’s been creating pieces on vintage postcards and I was lucky enough to nab one of the originals.

• Anna Schmidt – I have two of Anna’s screenprints – one in our dining room and another in the study. I just love her use of shape and colour.

• Dave Buonaguidi – Dave, known as ‘Real Hackney Dave’ on Instagram has already been mentioned in this blog but he’s worth mentioning again. He’s a bit of a legend in the art sphere and his work is always on point culturally. The way he turns found items – maps, cards, stamps, seed packets, even cash - into art is really inspiring. I’d love one of his large map pieces one day – definitely one for the wish list. I have a smaller piece of his, printed on a playing card in our study, which says ‘you have to deal with the cards you are dealt the best way you can’ and my brother has a piece that’s a dollar bill with ‘TRASH’ printed on it. There’s a real protest feel to a lot of his work and he’s also been doing some interesting stuff during lockdown too. Check him out.

• Michelle Thompson – I only discovered Michelle very recently on Instagram but have already added three of her pieces to our collection, including the second piece down on the very left of our main gallery wall, named ‘repair.’ Michelle’s work mixes collage and screen printing and is often very colourful, which is probably what draws me to it. She’s been featured in big titles like the New York Times, Vanity Fair and New Statesmen. Her prints are really affordable and she currently is offering 30% off, if you use the code BETTERDAYS30 on her website.

• Yvette Miller - Yvette is another contemporary abstract artist that I recently discovered on Instagram. I love her playful use of colours, mark making and abstract shapes. I bought a piece of hers recently called ‘It's all about the pink’, which explores the relationship between black and white and the colour created when the two meet. The pink was introduced to show just what a difference a strong and vibrant colour can make when it is paired with the monochrome family. It really made me think, particularly in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yvette is definitely one to watch and I’m really glad to have found her.

Framing/Frames:

• Any of the art in our home that particularly pops has almost certainly been professionally framed. The more recent pieces are by the lovely David at Turner Framing in Belfast, who is just opening up again. I honestly couldn’t recommend him more highly.

• I know I’ve extolled the virtues of DIY / budget framing in this post but if you have something special/expensive or that you want to be a feature in your home, definitely give him a shout. He’s very creative and his work has really enhanced some of my favourite prints/artworks, with bespoke, colour matched frames and slips – his float mounting technique also makes the pieces look so professional and is particularly useful for limited edition pieces, where you might want the artist’s signature or edition number to be visible in the border.

Some of my Favourite ‘Off the Shelf’ Frames are from:

• B&M Bargains – they have a great range called ‘New York’ that comes in white, black and silver, with pre-cut mounts perfect for standard sized A3, A4 and A5 prints. The most expensive one is the one that fits an A3 sized print with a frame and it comes in at the princely sum of £6.99. The A4 one linked is only £4.99 and with the chunky mount makes A4 prints look much more substantial. I had real trouble getting more of them during lockdown but they seem to have more back in stock now (locally here, anyway). I also got the gold frames with black mounts in here – only issue with these is they’re a little flimsy and have perspex fronts instead of glass, which I’m not a massive fan of. They’re totally grand, but I wouldn’t use them for anything expensive.

• The Range – they have a great selection of frames, with good mounts too. The sizing tends to be in inches/cms, so you’ll need to maybe need to look up the measurements if you’re looking for a frame to fit an A3 or A4 print for example but they’re pretty good.

• Dunelm and Sostrene Grene also have a good range of lovely contemporary narrow frames, though I do think they’re a little on the flimsier side, particularly when it comes to the hanging fixings – they’re totally fine though, particularly if it’s for something small/ lightweight.

• Supermarkets – Tesco and Sainsbury’s have been great for picking up smaller frames – most of the postcards I have framed are in frames from one or the other. Sainsbury’s have this nice range of double mount frames in their home collection that are nice too (the yellow one featured above is one of those and they have them in white and I think black too).