Interior designer Deborah Burnett offers Cindy Piccoli, host of HGTV's Decorating With Style, great tips to make picture arranging a cinch. If you have two pictures that are too small for a space, hang them side by side and complete the look with an inexpensive basket. Choose a long slender basket, fill it with three small potted plants, and fill in the empty areas with sphagnum moss. Weave short lengths of wire through the basket to serve as hooks, and hang the basket on the wall beneath the pictures. To add interest to a grouping, decorators advise using an odd number of objects whenever possible (the only even number you should use is two). Four pictures could be grouped in pairs in a staggered arrangement, and another item, such as a plaque for hanging keys, could be used to fill in the spaces. Unusual items such as a decorative napkin holder or an interesting gift box can be hung on the wall to balance a grouping. To hang an item, just add a saw-tooth hanger to the back. Interior designers avoid picture-hanging mistakes by first tracing around pictures and making paper templates. Draw an arrow on each template to show which end goes up, and hang with a small piece of removable poster tape (avoid masking tape, which can pull paint off the walls). Work out the picture arrangement before making holes in the wall. To achieve an interesting arrangement, stagger pictures rather than hang them in a straight line. To determine where to place staggered pictures, imagine a horizontal center line on one picture, and hang the second a bit above or below the line. To fill nail holes in a wall, Deborah advises using plain white toothpaste (not gel). Toothpaste doesn't sink into the holes the way spackling compound often does.
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