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03
May
Picking paints and colours for different rooms.
When matching paint colours with different rooms it is helpful to think of three factors and that is the type and purpose of the room, its size and your personality.
For kitchens yellow is most recommended, whilst blue seems to serve best in bedrooms, for living room choose green, red for hall and white for your bathroom. All types of interior will benefit from neutral colours such as brown, grey and white.
What kind of colours should we use in bright and dark interiors?
For bright and sunny interiors use cool colours. They will help to tone down the light.
For darker rooms you can use warm colours they will brighten up the interior.
If you wish to emphasize any design accessories such as furniture or paintings on walls opt for neutral palette – whites, greys and beige would be an excellent choice here.
Remember that wall colours should resonate with the size and shape of your interior. If you’d like to highlight any special features of the room such as cornice, mouldings or alcoves it is good to use paint with a tone darker or brighter from the neighbouring wall. Bright and vivid colours will help to hide imperfections while whites and greys will make them stand out even more.
REMEMBER
Above tips and hints are here to give us general guidance for what works best and it shouldn’t stop us from experimenting with different colours and interior decorating ideas. With all the shades and hues available on the market there are endless inspirations and ways to décor your interior exactly as you wish.
Glossy and matt wall textures.
The texture and finish of the paint may affect how we perceive an interior. A glossy paint will make room walls seem more distant from the ones painted in matt finish.
Colours vs. the size of interior.
Small rooms seem to benefit most from light and cool colours.
Large interiors don’t mind even the darkest of shade as it optically reduces the size of the room.
However it is best to use dark paint only as an accent as dark colours tend to make us feel tired quickly. Instead to bring the walls optically closer you can use intense hues of warm colours such as yellow, orange or brown shades.
What about narrow, low and high ceiling interiors?
There’s an old trick for narrow spaces – paint the shorter walls a shade or two darker than the longer ones. This will optically make the interior wider, more spacious and more proportional.
Low ceiling interiors should have the ceilings at least two shades lighter than walls and ideally you should opt for white if you want the room to appear higher.
The colour trick for high ceiling interiors is the exact opposite to the low ceiling ones – use darker shade for ceiling and it will optically make it look lower.
White as the base colour for your walls.
It is the easiest and the safest way to use white as your base colour and match it with some contrasting colour schemes and accents of your interior, such as picture frames, cushions or window frames.
If you are looking for a more sophisticated colour match the colour wheel would be of a great help here. It is divided into 12 sections of which the base comprises of the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. Between the primary colours the secondary colours are located which have formed by mixing the primary colours. The remaining hues have developed by mixing together the primary and the secondary palette. The colour wheel doesn’t include black, white and greys.
There are three basic ways of picking the right colours for your walls.
With a help of the colour wheel you can easily choose harmonious colour combinations that will work for you. By combining different shades of the same colour you will create a monochromatic and a safe interior. If you’d like to achieve a more harmonious effect combine adjacent hues from the wheel.
If you don’t want a colour to dominate the interior choose a combination of complementing hues – these are located on the opposite side of the wheel. This way you’ll achieve a nice and matching contrast just remember to keep the colours in the same tone.
You may as well take advantage of the ready-made colour schemes prepared directly by manufacturers or use one of the many available online applications for interior designers for colour mix and matching.
IT’S GOOD TO REMEMBER
Using too many colours may result in a visual chaos so if you’re not sure it’s good to remember the very basic interior design rule that says three different colours will suffice. The formula for combining colours is 70:20:10 percent.
Helpful tips for choosing paint hues for your walls.
Once you have chosen your colour it’s not quite the end, you will also need to choose the right shade of it.
If possible always check you paint samples on an actual wall – final results always come darker on a wall than on a small sample so if you are unsure choose a paint that’s a few shades lighter.
It’s always good to compare so why not take both a lighter and a darker sample from your chosen colour and see how they work in different corners and walls of the interior you want to paint.
Lighting plays a huge role when choosing the right colour palette, so make sure you check your samples in daylight as well as with artificial lighting.
Colour samples found in magazines or online can be retouched and may look completely different in reality than on the pictures. Make sure you check your samples against the ones instore to avoid disappointment.
Colours can be tricky when combined and it may be helpful to add a piece or two of furniture to make sure your walls and design accessories match together.
For kitchens yellow is most recommended, whilst blue seems to serve best in bedrooms, for living room choose green, red for hall and white for your bathroom. All types of interior will benefit from neutral colours such as brown, grey and white.
What kind of colours should we use in bright and dark interiors?
For bright and sunny interiors use cool colours. They will help to tone down the light.
For darker rooms you can use warm colours they will brighten up the interior.
If you wish to emphasize any design accessories such as furniture or paintings on walls opt for neutral palette – whites, greys and beige would be an excellent choice here.
Remember that wall colours should resonate with the size and shape of your interior. If you’d like to highlight any special features of the room such as cornice, mouldings or alcoves it is good to use paint with a tone darker or brighter from the neighbouring wall. Bright and vivid colours will help to hide imperfections while whites and greys will make them stand out even more.
REMEMBER
Above tips and hints are here to give us general guidance for what works best and it shouldn’t stop us from experimenting with different colours and interior decorating ideas. With all the shades and hues available on the market there are endless inspirations and ways to décor your interior exactly as you wish.
Glossy and matt wall textures.
The texture and finish of the paint may affect how we perceive an interior. A glossy paint will make room walls seem more distant from the ones painted in matt finish.
Colours vs. the size of interior.
Small rooms seem to benefit most from light and cool colours.
Large interiors don’t mind even the darkest of shade as it optically reduces the size of the room.
However it is best to use dark paint only as an accent as dark colours tend to make us feel tired quickly. Instead to bring the walls optically closer you can use intense hues of warm colours such as yellow, orange or brown shades.
What about narrow, low and high ceiling interiors?
There’s an old trick for narrow spaces – paint the shorter walls a shade or two darker than the longer ones. This will optically make the interior wider, more spacious and more proportional.
Low ceiling interiors should have the ceilings at least two shades lighter than walls and ideally you should opt for white if you want the room to appear higher.
The colour trick for high ceiling interiors is the exact opposite to the low ceiling ones – use darker shade for ceiling and it will optically make it look lower.
White as the base colour for your walls.
It is the easiest and the safest way to use white as your base colour and match it with some contrasting colour schemes and accents of your interior, such as picture frames, cushions or window frames.
If you are looking for a more sophisticated colour match the colour wheel would be of a great help here. It is divided into 12 sections of which the base comprises of the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. Between the primary colours the secondary colours are located which have formed by mixing the primary colours. The remaining hues have developed by mixing together the primary and the secondary palette. The colour wheel doesn’t include black, white and greys.
There are three basic ways of picking the right colours for your walls.
With a help of the colour wheel you can easily choose harmonious colour combinations that will work for you. By combining different shades of the same colour you will create a monochromatic and a safe interior. If you’d like to achieve a more harmonious effect combine adjacent hues from the wheel.
If you don’t want a colour to dominate the interior choose a combination of complementing hues – these are located on the opposite side of the wheel. This way you’ll achieve a nice and matching contrast just remember to keep the colours in the same tone.
You may as well take advantage of the ready-made colour schemes prepared directly by manufacturers or use one of the many available online applications for interior designers for colour mix and matching.
IT’S GOOD TO REMEMBER
Using too many colours may result in a visual chaos so if you’re not sure it’s good to remember the very basic interior design rule that says three different colours will suffice. The formula for combining colours is 70:20:10 percent.
Helpful tips for choosing paint hues for your walls.
Once you have chosen your colour it’s not quite the end, you will also need to choose the right shade of it.
If possible always check you paint samples on an actual wall – final results always come darker on a wall than on a small sample so if you are unsure choose a paint that’s a few shades lighter.
It’s always good to compare so why not take both a lighter and a darker sample from your chosen colour and see how they work in different corners and walls of the interior you want to paint.
Lighting plays a huge role when choosing the right colour palette, so make sure you check your samples in daylight as well as with artificial lighting.
Colour samples found in magazines or online can be retouched and may look completely different in reality than on the pictures. Make sure you check your samples against the ones instore to avoid disappointment.
Colours can be tricky when combined and it may be helpful to add a piece or two of furniture to make sure your walls and design accessories match together.