Your bedroom walls: your own personal gallery

You have loads of great photos that you want to show off to your friends and visitors to your house, right? And there’s a big, naked area of wall in your room screaming for dignity? Kill two birds with one stone and turn your room into a makeshift gallery.

I have written a quick recipe, based on what I did – feel free to change elements if you’re going to implement this yourself.

Ingredients:

• Photographs (preferably your own, but any images you like will do);
• A colour printer with plenty of ink (or just black and white if you’re feeling a little noir);
• Paper, scissors, blu-tack (or if you’re scabby like myself, UHU white-tack);
• Picasa, an all-round solid photo app by Google (you’ll see why I used this later);
• Space for photos, plus space for your gallery to grow;
• Plenty of patience.

Method:

• Use Picasa to ‘star’ the pictures that you would like to display in your gallery – this makes it easier to judge if the photos will fit together, and also allows for printing multiple images per sheet.
• Print out the images you wish to display. You can print 1, 2 or 4 pictures per page maximum, depending on the image size used. I used a selection of different sizes, depending on my fondness of the image in question. It is also useful to select ‘crop to fit’ rather than ‘resize to fit’, as the latter makes aligning your images later awkward.
• Cut out your photographs, trying to keep them as close to their original size as possible.
• Apply blu/white-tack to the corners of the images. For the larger images, or for any photos destined for a life on the ceiling, extra tack in the center of the edges may be necessary to prevent unsightly sag. Notice that very little tack is needed – a circle the size of a ring-binder hole will more than suffice.
• Stick the photos around your room! Be creative, arrange smaller photos around your full-page photos, and don’t be afraid to add dimension to your gallery by working around corners and up onto the ceiling above. It is also useful to start in one place and branch out – over time your gallery will grow and fill the available space, like some sort of self-replicating wall-parasite.

Being the virgo that I am, I like my photos arranged in some sort of order – apart from the general gallery around my bed, I have areas dedicated to graffiti, eye macros, wooded areas and nature, and experiments with light and shutter speeds.

Coming soon – blow up your photos with The Rasterbator!