Picture This.

Anyway, the picture got me all excited because I'd done something similar in my front room and learned quite a few useful things doing it that I thought would be great to share. Here's what my arrangement looks like:

(I know it's not important to anyone but me, but still I'd just like to note that the medal in the shadow box was my dad's from service in the Air Force. He gave each of us kids a framed one when he retired a few years ago.)
Here are my time- and money-saving tips:
First, I bought all my frames at a thrift store (total cost $10) and spray painted them all black to make them seem like they belonged together.


I then taped each cut-out "frame" to the wall and rearranged them until I found an arrangement I liked. This way I didn't have to put hole after hole in my wall, and I could still get some semblance of an idea of how they would look on the wall.



Here's my little secret regarding my framed "prints" like the one above. I didn't buy my prints, I made them...in minutes...and if you have a printer and some nice heavy paper you can too. (Sorry about the awful flash in the pic. I was too impatient to wait for the light to be brighter in the front room to take a picture without it. Just realize that this looks better in person.)
I searched online and found a few etchings by Rembrandt that I liked. Then, I printed them out on cheap, heavy watercolor paper with my inkjet printer. To give them more of that art gallery feel I tore the edges. To do this, I placed my ruler on top of the print about 1/4 of an inch from the edge and then, holding the ruler firmly with one hand, I pulled up on the edge of the paper with the other hand tearing it in a straight line along the ruler. Then I mounted it on black paper to really bring out those torn edges.

If you look at the pictures from Real Simple , they don't even have matte boards. They are just mounted in the middle of a piece of white paper or board. How simple is that?
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