ON February 1, Tony Ellwood and Andrew Clark will celebrate six months as the director and deputy director of Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria.

In the 152-year evolution of this museum, a half-year is a tiny fragment. But for visitors familiar with NGV's hallowed halls, the arrival of Ellwood and Clark from the Queensland Art Gallery, where they worked in identical roles, has already brought obvious changes.

A big noisy contemporary artwork has been installed in the foyer of NGV International on St Kilda Road while opposite, just inside the glass, kids and adults are invited to sit and sketch on a semi-circular cushion described as a "kids comic zone". At NGV Australia at Federation Square, Clark has overseen installation of John Campbell's popular free interactive exhibit Just Sing What You Feel, which encourages visitors to do just that. Within the neo-impressionist Radiance exhibition there are explanatory wall cards specifically for kids - not an entirely new initiative but in this show given greater prominence than before.

Most tellingly, gallery floor staff are coming out from behind desks where possible, engaging with visitors in a fashion unlike the NGV of old. Ellwood says one of the first things he did when he took over was review the gallery's approach to customer service.

"That was bottling up in me," he says. "I thought if I can make one difference that's the one I will make."

He has asked staff to look all visitors in the eye and deliberately welcome them to the gallery so no matter where they come from or what they look like they are put at ease in what can be an intimidating space. "We also talked about new communities," Ellwood says, referring to Melbourne's various ethnic diasporas and how he wants African families and migrants from the Middle East to feel happy visiting the NGV.

While some changes are subtle, such as the repurposing of various rooms and galleries, others, like Just Sing What You Feel, boldly announce a new direction.

The pair is pleased that their changes appear to be attracting more visitors, even though Ellwood says neither the board nor the Victorian government has specifically said that's what they want. The director won't reveal numbers for his first six months or for the paid exhibitions held during that period because he says they are not directly comparable to previous results.

But during what the gallery describes as the "festive period", from Boxing Day to January 6, a total of 62,000 people crossed the thresholds of the St Kilda Road and Federation Square sites. That is 24 per cent higher than the same period last year and an even greater increase on average attendances for the same period for three summers earlier.

Ellwood attributes the rise to initiatives such as new free Sunday afternoon art classes as well as a busier exhibition program under the "Summer is best spent indoors" campaign. The new team inherited from their predecessors ticketed exhibitions of work by Canadian photographer Jeff Wall and the neo-impressionist art survey beginning with French painter Georges Seurat.

Ellwood and Clark added to the schedule a small ticketed show of photographs by German sculptor Thomas Demand and Just Sing What You Feel. Ellwood says he wants to repeat what he did in Brisbane by creating a habit of summer gallery going, in addition to Melbourne's Winter Masterpieces series of which he was one of the original architects. The children's room to the right of the main foyer at NGV International is set to be repurposed for exhibitions but activity stations for kids will pop up throughout the entire gallery complementing exhibitions where possible.

One blight on the pair's approach to repurposing spaces saw Eko Nugroho's big black painting on the glass behind the comic zones cause one of the panels in the gallery's famous water wall to crack in the summer sun, leading to month-long, costly repairs. "Yes," Ellwood admits, "it's driven me nuts."

Increased traffic will raise running costs for the cash-strapped gallery, but the director anticipates it will also generate more revenue through commercial operations. After two successive deficits he is aiming to break even this financial year.