Coloring Within the Lines—Ideas for Using Color Inside Your Home
From the Color Experts at Sherwin-Williams
If your CCQ (Color Confidence Quotient!) is modest but you’d like to boost it by learning more about color placement basics, consider the rules of thumb below. However, if you’re sure of your personal style, feel free to break the rules and create new looks that reflect your unique tastes and personality.
• When creating a warm or cool color scheme, choose one color as the predominant color and then other colors as accent colors.
• If you have a long and narrow room, you can consider painting the end walls a darker shade than the long, narrow walls. The darker colors will recede and will create an illusion of width in this instance. Light colors will advance.
• Solids and simple patterns reduce visual weight, while bold patterns add visual weight.
• Bright and intense colors add visual weight, while muted, neutral colors reduce visual weight.
• To make a small room look larger, choose a light-color paint and select furnishings in the same color family. Or, you can paint some of the furniture to match the walls.
• Light-color ceilings will attract attention, but dark-color ceilings will direct the eye back to head level, allowing the focus to be on the walls, furnishings and accessories.
• Light affects color dramatically. Fluorescent light tends to be cool lighting and brings out more green or blue in a color. Incandescent light—light bulbs—brings more of the red or warmth out in a color. It is important to view colors in daylight or night, because they will appear different.
• The location of color within an interior space can make a great deal of difference in influencing the room’s character. A color placed on a ceiling, wall or door may elicit many different reactions.
• Perception of temperature may also be altered with color. Most design schemes contain more than one color in a space, so if the design includes a color from each group—warm and cool—coordination of the space is still accomplished.
Sherwin-Williams is located at 3574 Electric Road in Roanoke. Contact them at 540 989-2715.
Visit sherwin-williams.com for other area locations
• When creating a warm or cool color scheme, choose one color as the predominant color and then other colors as accent colors.
• If you have a long and narrow room, you can consider painting the end walls a darker shade than the long, narrow walls. The darker colors will recede and will create an illusion of width in this instance. Light colors will advance.
• Solids and simple patterns reduce visual weight, while bold patterns add visual weight.
• Bright and intense colors add visual weight, while muted, neutral colors reduce visual weight.
• To make a small room look larger, choose a light-color paint and select furnishings in the same color family. Or, you can paint some of the furniture to match the walls.
• Light-color ceilings will attract attention, but dark-color ceilings will direct the eye back to head level, allowing the focus to be on the walls, furnishings and accessories.
• Light affects color dramatically. Fluorescent light tends to be cool lighting and brings out more green or blue in a color. Incandescent light—light bulbs—brings more of the red or warmth out in a color. It is important to view colors in daylight or night, because they will appear different.
• The location of color within an interior space can make a great deal of difference in influencing the room’s character. A color placed on a ceiling, wall or door may elicit many different reactions.
• Perception of temperature may also be altered with color. Most design schemes contain more than one color in a space, so if the design includes a color from each group—warm and cool—coordination of the space is still accomplished.
Sherwin-Williams is located at 3574 Electric Road in Roanoke. Contact them at 540 989-2715.
Visit sherwin-williams.com for other area locations
