Budget Decorator: A Most Affordable Gallery Wall

Wall art has a big impact on the design of your home. Whether it’s a picture, print, photograph, quilt — you name it — it can reveal your taste, your point of view, your color preferences, your family history and even your sense of humor.

But one of the things that can be a shock when you’re finding art for your home is how expensive it can be. I’ve had the experience, for example, of discovering a fantastic print at a garage sale for a very reasonable price, then needing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when I got the estimate from the do-it-yourself frame shop.

But I’ve found a solution to this problem, and I’m going to share it with you: calendar art.

The high cost of art is driven home whenever I get an itch to do one of my favorite types of displays: a collection of six, eight or a dozen prints, all grouped in identical frames, like the ones in this living room.


They might be botanicals …


… or Audubon prints …


… or old magazine covers on a favorite theme.


In the calendar section of the local bookstore, I’ve discovered fantastic art collections, including calendars filled with beautiful reproductions of Japanese prints, Audubon birds, animals and all kinds of botanicals, as well as vintage travel posters and even vegetable posters. It’s a treasure trove of very inexpensive art, usually available for less than $20. (Even less if you wait until April or May, when calendars go on sale.)

Last year I needed a wall full of pictures for an extra bedroom, and it was the perfect opportunity for the kind of collection we’re talking about. So off to the bookstore I went, and found this very cool calendar of vintage Italian travel posters. Presto! Instant collection.


For frames I happened to have a bunch (eight, to be exact) lying around in a closet from a past project. They were simple, inexpensive, ready-made black frames that I had bought at an art store some years ago. Serendipitously, they were the right shape and size for the calendar prints I was using.

Custom frames are certainly worthwhile for special pieces, but they can be expensive. For many applications ready-made frames will work perfectly well, and they can be acquired for a very reasonable price at stores like Michael’s, Pier 1 and Target.


Custom matting is beautiful and can really enhance your art, but the cost quickly adds up when you’re doing multiple pictures. My solution was to go to the local art store and find a really nice paper (heavyweight and acid free) that I could mount the prints on top of. It looks very much like matting and performs the same function of adding a layer of color and texture between the picture and the frame — but at a fraction of the price.

I think I paid $6 for enough paper for all the pictures. As you can see here, the typical art store offers a good assortment of high-quality papers in different colors and textures.


I picked a beige-y neutral paper with a little bit of texture that I felt would go well with the vintage feel and color of the prints.


The next step was simply putting my scissors to work.


I picked my eight favorite prints from the 12 and cut out each one, being careful to leave about 1/16 inch of border around each picture. That bit of border just seemed to add a little something extra.


Each frame already had a piece of stiff white cardboard as a backing. Ready-made frames usually come with a backing, but if not, you can buy cardboard stock at an art or craft store. What I needed to do next was to cut the “matting” paper the same size as the backing.


After that it was simply a matter of putting a 3-inch strip of two-sided tape on the back of the print in the middle and about an inch from the top.


Then I turned the print over, centered it on the beige matting paper to create an even border around the print, and pressed down carefully on the tape to secure it in place. (Obviously, the picture wasn’t centered yet when I took this photo.)


Being careful to make sure the inside of the glass was clean (I cleaned the outside later), I turned the print over and put it inside the frame, then put the backing over it.


The last step was to secure the backing with little nails or tacks. I used a small tack hammer and gently but firmly nailed the tacks into the frame on the top, bottom and both sides. Some ready-made frames include tacks that you can bend into place.


And voilà! A framed vintage-style Italian travel poster. You’ll notice, by the way, that the matting is wider at the bottom than on the top and sides. This is a technique framers often use to give the picture a little weight at the bottom. In my case it worked because the ready-made frames were a little too long — another serendipitous occurrence.


For very little money and effort, what was a great, blank wall in my study became a warm and interesting gallery of prints. You can see six of the eight here. If you have a similar empty wall staring longingly at you, maybe my little project will inspire you.

More: 20 Great Ways to Display Family Photos

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