I’m going to spend Labor Day weekend painting in my new house. Until then, I’ll be busy trying to find the answer to a question I’m sure many of you have also grappled with: What color do I paint my walls?
It’s a bit overwhelming, in part because the first step in determining what color to paint your walls is figuring out a color scheme for the room. This involves considering how possible shades might work with the lighting, flooring, and decor that is or will be in your room.
What’s an intrepid homeowner to do when it comes time to create a color scheme? To start the process, I rely on some color basics.
Let’s start with the color wheels.
Light reflected through a prism creates a rainbow of color known as a color spectrum. Visible light is made up of seven groups of wavelengths: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Red has the longest wavelength and violet the shortest. This color progression from longest to shortest wavelength is often presented on a color wheel.
The color wheel includes 12 colors: three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), plus three secondary and six tertiary colors. Secondary colors are created by mixing primary hues (for example, green is a secondary color created by combining red and yellow). If you mix a primary color with a secondary color, you have a tertiary color (like greenish yellow, which is created by mixing green and yellow).
The purity or saturation of a color is called intensity. The primary, secondary, and tertiary hues on a standard color wheel show colors at their full intensity. There are a couple of ways to change the intensity of a color. Adding white to a color brightens its intensity, creating a hue. Darkening a color with black creates a shadow. And adding gray to a certain tone creates a tone. These techniques also affect value (lightness or darkness) of a color: hue leads to a lighter value, while shading leads to a darker value.
The color wheel provides a great starting point for creating color schemes to use in your home. All you have to do is choose a color and create possible schemes around it.
Monochrome color schemes use a color in a variety of intensities. The key to making a monochrome color scheme work is to use multiple tints or shades of a color (but watch out for too many contrast values!).
Complementary the colors are located on opposite sides of the wheel. (Red and green are complementary colors commonly used at Christmas, but watered-down versions of the hues also work great for anytime decor.)
split complementary Schemes feature three colors: a primary or intermediate color and the two colors on either side of its opposite. Try using a single warm color (like orange) against cool colors (like blues and blue violets) for a split complementary scheme.
Triadic they involve three hues that are equidistant on the color wheel, such as red, yellow schemes, and blue.
Analogous color schemes are created by using colors next to each other on the color wheel; for example, blue looks good with blue-violet and blue-green, which are on either side.
it’s fine. So now you know a bit about how color works and how to create a color scheme. But that still doesn’t help you decide which colors to use, does it? Here are some tips for selecting a color to boost your scheme:
Choose colors that appeal to you. What shades attract you? Look at the clothes in your closet or the colors that appeal to you when shopping or looking at magazines. Just because blue is your favorite color doesn’t mean you should paint your entire house blue, of course, but at least it gives you a starting point.
look for inspiration Do you spend a lot of time outdoors? Look to nature for color ideas. Do you have a favorite painting that you want to display in your home? Maybe you can get the colors for your scheme from that artwork. Everything from fabric patterns to a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table can create color inspiration.
Consider the mood Different colors evoke different responses in people. For example, warm colors like yellow, red, and orange are energizing and can help wake up a room (making them ideal for offices or kitchens). Passive or cool tones like soft blues, greens, and purples work well in bedrooms because they are calming. And neutral colors (browns, beiges, grays, taupes, whites, and blacks) are, as the name suggests, somewhere in the middle, which is why they’re so useful for bringing rooms together, toning down other colors, or creating a natural color palette. Do you remember the intensity? That affects the mood: too high intensity colors are bright and bright, while low intensity colors are calm and subdued.
Get help. There are many resources available to help you select the correct shades. take a color test [http://www.waverly.com/decorate/colorquiz.asp] to find out your preferences. (I happen to like warm colors, which may explain why I gravitate toward sunny yellow for my office and a deep red hue for a bedroom accent wall.)
Or check out the websites of paint manufacturers like Behr and Sherwin-Williams for all kinds of ideas and inspiration.
If you’re having trouble envisioning what the colors you select will look like in your rooms, try Color-A-Room, which lets you try out different shades on walls and furniture in a variety of different settings.
Do you want to know what colors I finally select for my rooms? Stay tuned!
