How To Hang Your Art
August 12, 2023
I have always been pretty confident that I know how to hang fine art, but it wasn’t until I worked at a gallery that I realized I had no idea how to hang fine art. If you don’t care that much about perfection, you can just skip past this post, but if you want to elevate your space, keep reading.
Here is what you will need:
Piece of art
Way to hang the piece ( whether this be nails or command hook or whatever other hanging device you have )
Hammer
Measuring tape
Patience
Basic math skills or a calculator ( I will always choose calculator )
Firstly, you want your standalone pieces to be at eye level, which is roughly 60 inches from the ground, for the average person. So start your equation with 60, then measure the piece you are wanting to hang and divide that in half. For the sake of this example, I am going to say we are hanging a piece that is 30×30. So you measure the piece from top to bottom, and half of that is 15 inches.
If there is a wire, pull it taught and measure it from the top of the piece to the peak of the taught wire. Again, for the sake of this this example we will say that the wire, held taught, is 5 inches from the top. So we are going to take 60+15= 75 – 5 = 70 which means you are going to put the nail in at 70 inches from the ground.
Now, if we are hanging a piece in a gallery wall, all of these rules kind of go out the window. If there are already pieces up on the wall, a lot of spacing depends on how much space you are wanting to cover, how large your pieces are and how many pieces you are going to want to be adding. There has been a technique that has been going around the internet of people setting out pieces on a large piece of paper and tracing the pieces once they are organized in a way that you feel looks the best, then taping this piece to your wall and hanging the pieces over ( or on, rather) the paper making sure that they are very securely hung and then taking the art back off the wall so that just the nails remain and tearing the sheet of paper off. Each piece should be equally far apart from one another, whether that be 2 inches or an inch or however much you want the distance to be between them.
Good luck, and enjoy filling your home with art! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me on instagram @alydevineart
