I have done something similar in my hallways, floor to ceiling prints and paintings, different ones, oils, acrylics, water colors and plain old prints, some numbered, some signed, others just TJ Maxx, etc.

First, a bit of practical advice: before you start putting nails in the wall to hang these, get some brown paper and cut out silhouettes -- squares and rectangles in the exact same size as your pictures -- and play around with positioning by taping them to the wall.

This is the best way to get a good arrangement without putting a lot of holes in the wall.

I think the pictures will look fine the way they are...

However, if you want a more unified look, you can do it with color -- the color of the frames or the color of the matting, or both.

You could make all the frames black, for example. Or make all the matting burgundy.

It would certainly be less expensive to paint the frames than to have everything re-matted.

To me, the leaf pictures don't go with the other pictures.

I love wall galleries and have had them .

Nearly all the pictures have blk in them . I think painting
all the frames blk would look good. In fact thats what I
did with mine.

The mats wouldn't have to match unless you have some that
really clash with another.
Then I would remat the *odd one out*

What a view out that DR window!
Lovely home you have.

Thanks, everyone. Mclarke, great idea on the brown paper cutoouts, especially since we're going to have to rig a scaffold of some kind and the whole project will be tough because of that.

With all your FB, I've now tried to vary the pieces a little more. I added a big gold K (our last name), a Japanese gold-framed calligraphy piece, and a landscape, all of which I had at first thought I couldn't use. This varies it a little more and ties in the leaves better, I think.

I'll post a pic of the finished wall, and thanks again.

Maybe it's just me... but would the leaf pictures look better if they were hung with the dark stripes downward?

The idea is good, and I do like several of your paintings, however I don't like them displayed together. I do like to mix things up so-to-speak but the time periods of the paintings work against eachother instead of blend or work with eachother.

Hmmm, food for thought. mclarke, I'll see how the leaves look with the stripes down. When we had them framed this was the way they seemed to go, but I'll give it a try the other way. We're doing your paper pasteup tonight and painting the wall tomorrow.

cindyxeus, I wanted an eclectic look. Each of these paintings has a personal meaning for us, so this is what we've got available to go with. You may be right, I guess we'll know by morning.

Thanks again, all.

I had many different looks in my pictures.
Some oil, some mass produced, different time periods.
That was the attraction of the *gallery look* to me.

You will be able to tell once you get them all laid out.
Looking forward to pictures.

This is just one suggestion I would make. The leaves need to be framed similar to a tryptic and then leave some space for the next grouping of pictures. Remember if you do journalism or year book in high school when s/he said, "too much white space...too little white space..." In doing a gallery wall like this when you have three "belong togethers," leave very little "white space" and when the next group of dissimilar to that moves in, add more white space and put all similar grouping with less white space but leave lots of white space when they are dissimilar. I hope that makes sense.

I think the leaves would look better somewhere else, even if you have to get three other prints or paintings to add to replace those. They are more contemporary and the mattes all match on those, so they would look better in their own grouping somewhere else - perhaps farther down on the stairway wall around the corner? The rest of those in the grouping look good together.

I agree, I think the leaves would look darling in a vertical grouping -- perhaps in a bathroom, or kitchen maybe -- and yes with the darker stripes downward, as if they are the ground.

I think "eclectic" is neat but it can be a bit hard to pull off gracefully. I actually hired a decorator once and she came out and started telling me that my antiques were not all from the same period. So what? The average person wouldn't even know that, much less care. And if their opinions are THAT critical, surely they can find their way back to the front door.

That said, I think it's lovely that you're decorating with the tings you love. Ultimately it's YOU who needs to be pleased with your own home -- and you do have a lovely home. If the wall makes you feel good when you look at it, then you've reached your goal. If it makes your guests feel good, that's a bonus.

Stairwells are a bear to decorate, I think. I wish they would do a few HGTV shows on stairwells and teensy weensy entry halls/foyers. One of these days we should have a big ol' thread on stairwells and teensy landings. My front door comes in at my landing and I don't have pretty railings like you do. I just have a half wall with a cap of wood on it. What does one do with that? I lack the skills or I'd whip out a saw and rectify that problem.

Good luck with getting the arrangement just the way you want it, and please post pictures when you're done.

Art galleries, if this is what you are creating, are not meant to "match" decor, but give you something you love at which to look. Getting back to the old yearbook idea, would you omit some of your children's pictures just because some were not as pretty as others, or one had blond hair while all the others had black?