How do I hang pictures?

Once you have framed your art prints you need to hang them on a wall, put your pictures in the living room, bedroom, kitchen and up the stairs, and make your home visually stunning! Pictures really do make a room, not only do they add colour and provide a talking point for your guests, but they also make your home feel personal and unique.

Putting picture hooks in the wall can be very easy if you have a decent thickness of plaster, but very difficult if you have a layer of plaster board over brick or breeze block. In which case you can either use the little white hooks with three or four small pins in the back, called hard wall hanging hooks, (although it's not a good idea to use these above a radiator as the plastic can become brittle with the heat), or get out your hammer drill and rawl plugs. It is always best to use two hooks or nails - not only does this help keep the picture level but if one hook or nail fails the other will stop the picture falling to the floor, breaking the glass and possibly damaging your art.

To work out where to put the hooks, hold the picture up in the position you want it and mark, in pencil, where the middle of the top of the frame is on the wall. Then prop the picture up against your legs with the front facing you, lean down and pick it up by the hanging cord with one finger one under the cord at each side, your fingers should be each about a quarter of the way from the sides of the frame. If they are very close to the top you need to shorten the hanging cord. Lift the picture up so you are taking all the weight on your two fingers, now put the frame down and keep one finger carefully in position against the back of the picture and release the weight, mark where you finger is and where the other finger was, measure the height from the top and distance between the marks, and your can then work out where your hooks need to go in the wall. Remember to add the height of the picture hook as this is usually a centimetre or so below the nail.

For hanging a ‘gallery’ wall, just plunge in, don’t do too much planning or you will overcomplicate things. Start with a larger picture to put near the centre and start hanging round it using the method above. If the worst comes to the worst you will have a few extra holes in your wall which will probably be covered up by pictures anyway, if not a bit of polyfilla, and hope you still have the remains of the paint you used. If you try to align the tops or sides of pictures you have to get it spot on otherwise it looks a bit rubbish. If on the other hand you don't try to leave a difference of at least a few centimetres, it will always look good.