Decorating your home with family portraits

Decorating your home with family portraits can be much more than putting an 8×10 or a few 5x7s on a bookshelf or side table.   Many Ann Arbor area follks tend to choose those smaller images to display in their homes… and over time have lots of cameo sized pictures spread around the house. It is spring,  you may want to give your family portrait decoration a spring lift.  What follows is a suggestion to tune-up  your existing family portrait decoration.

Gather all ye little family pictures…

I often suggest this to portrait clients:  Gather all those little framed family pictures together and display them together.  A grouping of photos–even tiny 5×7′s– hang with much more prominence when arranged in one single wall.  Small frames are easy to  inexpensively replace,  transforming your ‘rag-tag’ into ‘eclectic’.

[While many plain bare walls are crying for decoration that is not the subject of this article. However at Photo Generations we have added a special service for those looking to decorate their walls with fresh new family portraits.   Our new family portrait decoration service is more precise--'pre-envisioned' as Ansel Adms might say --than the method described below, because we use it before you make your family portrait decisions--but that is a subject for later...]

It is a lot of fun to look at the group of family pictures

It is a lot of fun to look at the group of family pictures on your wall and see the differences a few years makes in how everyone looks.  Your ‘cameo gallery’ of portraits means more when you can access all the images in one place–So much more of a statement than an image here and there scattered in various rooms.

Once you pull your cameo family portrait gallery together from the existing pictures in the house, you will be amazed how great they look together!

Creating a ‘cameo gallery’

First:  choose the wall.  It may be on the staircase heading to the basement, the upstairs hallway, the family room, the media room.

Next: design the gallery.  An basic method to design your cameo gallery is to layout your frames on the floor.  Arrange them in a pleasing manner.   You may prefer a perfect grid–you may like an assymetrical grouping.   Or, if you like to doodle, first draw a sketch of the wall and the little pictures.  Or, cut out colored squares for each picture and arrange them on your wall sketch till it looks good to you.

A grouping of smaller 5×7 pictures works so much better than the same pictures on different walls-even in the room.  The reason is this:  the grouping creates a focal point.  Your eyes will be drawn to that focal point because it is the most interesting thing on the wall in a room.  A group of even tiny pictures becomes, from a distance, a single focal point.

Tools to make hanging your portrait easier for small family portraits in small frames

An easy hanger is a ‘wall grabber’ type wall hook that will hold small and lightweight frames.   They are one piece metal pieces you gently knock into the wall, they stay put on modern walls very well.   On white walls they are nearly invisible.

If you have one of those fancy laser beam levelers, use it!.  You want to determine the outside reference points of your wall grouping.  The top (or sides) of  frame groupings makes sense to sight, rather than the actual wall hanger.  Use a light pencil mark and mark your wall.

You will want to know where the hanger on the back of each picture is, because it seems they are never exactly the same.  Test hang  your frame to see where the wall hook has to be in order to align the frame where you want it.

As you hang your pictures, knock just one hanger into the wall at a time, then hang the picture that goes on it right away, then move on to the next picture that hopefully you have laidout on a nearby floor.  This one-at-a-time method lets  you custom fine tune– how high or low to put the wall hook–depending on where the hook on the back of the picture is.  Generally it looks best if the tops of frames in your grouping are aligned in your pattern.  Not all frames need to be precisely arranged,  just having a few key frames precisely aligned goes a long way to creating a pleasing layout.

No mystery to decorating with portraits

The great thing about grouping your older smaller images into one presentation, is this: You have more room for new family art!

I know, because I have gone through the process  described above with our family pictures.  And over the years I have gravitated to larger sized family portraits and whimsical child portraits.  One beautiful portrait is so much more powerful (and has more decorating use) in a room!  But that is a discussion for another day!

Meanwhile let’s enjoy this beautiful spring weather in Dexter, Ann Arbor and all over Washtenaw county. H ey why not create a new child or family portrait to decorate our walls with!