How to add ART to your walls for {practically} FREE!

 

Today I thought I would show off some cute new prints I made for my breakfast room walls, but also share some other ways to inexpensively fill the empty walls in your home. Ever since we moved from our smaller ‘coastal’ home to a much larger ‘suburban’ home {because it goes without saying that you get more bang for your buck when you don’t live 5 minutes from the beach!}, the space is great but I feel like I have a never-ending expanse of walls to fill.

 

 

Now that my children are practically teenagers, I have relegated most of the baby pictures that used to decorate our walls to more private spaces in our homes or sadly, packed them away. They prefer not to have their younger selves on display throughout the house, though I am hanging on to a few special ones I refuse to give up {like the ones in our Gallery Wall}.

 

 

Art, even nicely framed prints, can get expensive quickly. I love it when I come across a free printable that speaks to me like these lovely vintage bird prints from Ella Claire Inspired did. I printed them off before I was even sure where I would use them, but the pale colors were perfect in our breakfast room and work well with the neutral paint color in here.

 

 

I have developed kind of a thing for birds and seem to use them frequently in my decorating. They are especially perfect to usher in spring, and these prints look like ones you would find at an antique store– but they are free! I added them into some Target frames {spray painted with Rustoleum satin nickel} and they now fill up an empty corner of our breakfast room perfectly.

 

 

Have you heard of the app ‘Waterlogue’? Another favorite trick is to take a favorite photo–landscapes and nature photos work particularly well– and run it through the Waterlogue app. It’s available on the app store for a small fee, but it takes photos and makes them look like a watercolor painting. The image above is after it’s been transformed in the app; once it was done, I simply saved it on my phone, printed it on card stock and framed it. For comparison purposes the image below is the one I started with, I admit that the photo itself is pretty incredible.  My uncle took it at our family cabin in Maine last fall, I’ll probably also frame it just as it is to display as well.  My house is filled with pictures from Maine, it’s the most special place in the world to us.

 

 

For now, I added this image to the gallery wall in our family room just in a simple white frame, I like the pop of color mixed in with the other black and white photos in the space {see the gallery wall HERE}. I have tried to use the Waterlogue app to create other art with faces, but I prefer the look of landscapes because portraits can lose most of their definition. It’s still fun to play around with and it’s a fabulous way to turn sentimental photos into art, perfect for displaying on walls.

 

 

Across the room I added some more nature pictures to fill yet another empty corner. The bottom print came from Minted so that one wasn’t free, but the cost was nominal for such a pretty painted image of birch trees. {Minted has a great selection of art prints FYI, be sure to sign up for their emails for extra savings}.

 

The picture on the top is just a black and white print of a picture, again one taken in Maine. I added these prints to some cheap IKEA frames {again, spray painted!}.  They work nicely together because their colors are similar and the two frames together fills up most of the space on what used to be an empty wall.

 

 

Finally, you can always make your home more fun and interesting just by framing some fun printables. In our small bar area between our Kitchen and Dining Room, I added this “Pop, Fizz, Clink” printable. I actually made it for New Year’s Eve a few years ago but liked it so much I never put it away!  Now it just sits on the bar with our drink ware, it’s a tiny bit of celebration every day of the year :). The printable was free {here} and I just tucked it into an existing frame. This bar is another space I have big plans for {and boxes of tile sitting and waiting to be hung} but for now the printable at least adds a little interest to the currently rather boring space.

 

 

Of course, the Botanical Gallery Wall Christy made last winter is a fabulous way to fill a wall for next to nothing. I am still working on some of our larger wall spaces, like our stairs, and may need to steal that idea for those spaces!

 

XO,

 

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