Gallery-Wrapped Photo Canvas Wall Collage
Here’s a design-ey something we recently put together.
We have a pretty big living room with vaulted, sloped ceilings, which means we’ve always had one wall that was just really, really big. We’ve tried a variety of things to fill the space without a lot of success.
Then we got a Groupon offer with a ridiculous discount for gallery-wrapped photos on canvas. A 16x20-in, 1.5-in. thick canvas—usually $127—for a third that price. So we bought several and decided to wedge them all together on the wall to make a giant collage (with a larger 20x30-in. canvas in the middle).
Thanks, Ty Pennington!
We’ve tried these gallery-wrapped canvas Groupon deals before using color photos and have generally been disappointed. The colors in the final product always ended up way too saturated. As in: we all had magenta-to-purple lips. (In real life, we have lips of lovely, and quite average, pinkness.)
So this time we decided to take some of our favorite family photos—some old, some more recent—and turn them all black and white. Surely we wouldn’t end up purple-lipped this way.
Using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (I’m a designer), we figured out our favorite arrangement of the photos and their orientation. I made sure to increase the contrast once we desaturated them so they weren’t too grayed out.
We were pleased with the results from Canvas on Demand. Excellent printing. (Finally.)
It took a lot of measuring and at least a couple of readjustments, but we finally got all the canvasses in place on the wall. This is harder than you’d think when they’re supposed to all touch.
We’re very happy with the end result. It fills up the wall, the black-and-white offers a good contrast with the neutral paint job, and it’s pretty eye-catching. Even better, it was far less expensive than it could have been.
