Four Easy Steps For Picking Paint Colors

So you’ve decided to paint a wall, a room, or your whole house. Congratulations! Many people are too afraid of color to try it yet paint is the easiest and quickest way to bring a new, fresh look to your home. But there are a few things you should definitely keep in mind during the process of picking paint colors.

Step One: Like a color
To start, if you are drawn to a specific hue, explore that color family. If you are not, start with an inspiration—a piece of art work, a pillow, a rug, even a piece of clothing can provide a color palette or direction. You can also choose a color palette based on established color schemes which I covered here in a prior post entitled “Let’s Talk About Color: Four Color Schemes To Know And Love.”

Step Two: Find a paint chip
Your next step is to go to the paint store and browse chips: those are the little squares of color that often come on a strip of paper, sometimes five or six to a strip. It can often be a little overwhelming looking at so many different tints, tones, and shades of the same hue, so here is something that might help you to keep some sense: generally, the middle color on a strip, or color family, is the pure hue. Then the color lightens (a tint) and darkens (a shade) on either side of the parent color. This is why it is called a color family.

When looking at paint swatches, please please please hold them up vertically, as if you are looking at them on the wall. The way the light falls onto a surface dramatically changes the intensity and hue of a color. You may have encountered this with fabric. It is amazing how different the color of a shirt can appear when it is draped across a bed waiting to be worn versus how it looks on a hanger.

Step Three: View the color in your space
Once you have chosen a color—or colors (you go, you color daredevil!)—you will want to look at samples of the paint. For your next purpose, the tiny swatch you get at the paint store kiosk will not cut it. You need to see the color in a large format. Buy the largest swatch the paint manufacturer sells or better yet, buy a tester pot.

Either tape the swatch to the wall, or—and this is my preferred method—paint the color on your walls. Now here is an extra step that many people miss when painting sample patches but it will help you to more clearly and confidently choose a color: if your current walls are not white, you need to paint the wall a white color-blocking primer first, since wall colors can bleed through certain paints and interfere with the way the color reads on the wall. It is best to start with a blank white surface in order to achieve the purest form of the color.

Live with the color(s) on the wall(s) for a few days. The next step is very important: watch at different times of the day—and evening—to see how the hue changes with the changing light. If you like a hue in the daytime, but it turns a yucky color at night, then that is probably not a color you would want to paint, say, your bedroom, since you will be seeing the color mostly at night! Also keep in mind color-bounce from outdoors: if you have a large expanse of green lawn outside of a large window in your room, your color will be tinged with green at different times of the day. If you live next to a building whose wall is a light color, your chosen hue most likely will end up being much more intense at certain times due to increased light bouncing into your space.

Step Four: Pick your paint!
But before you make a final decision, remember that if you are painting an entire room a hue, that color will intensify because any light will make it reflect from the adjacent walls back onto itself. It will create a kind of visual feedback loop. Your paint will come in a variety of finishes as well. You will want to pick a finish based on where the wall is and what kind of traffic it is going to see. Kitchens and bathrooms generally take a semi-gloss since that finish allows for the most ability to be cleaned. Walls that are highly textured with an orange peel plaster for example, should not be painted in a high gloss--the pits, crags, and bumps of the plaster will only be highlighted by the gloss, creating shadows on every irregularity. For these walls it is best to use a satin or pearl finish.

Sometimes people ask if paint dries darker or lighter. This is a tricky question to answer since ideally, the paint should dry to match the exact hue on the swatch. Having said that, not all paint is created equal. Like with almost everything in life, one gets what one pays for, and paints of higher quality tend to behave better (they go on smoother, less brush strokes/roller marks, better coverage, and more pigments so the colors are more saturated, etc.). But when paint is wet, no matter if it is high or lesser quality, all bets are off. It is hard to tell before it dries. Lesser quality paints that have less pigment tend to go on dark and dry up to the hue. Higher quality paints tend to go on lighter and dry down to the hue. So don’t panic when the paint is being applied. It will look different when dry.

Keep in mind that your space, when being prepped and painted, is devoid of drapes, rugs, furniture, and art on the walls. If the color you have chosen seems too intense or too much, remember that probably much of it will be hidden by furnishings, drapes, and art. You are going to end up seeing less than what you see when the room is bare.

Of course picking a paint color can and should be tied in to all the other elements in a room, or perhaps the rest of the house... and if you want an advocate to help you out, give me a call!
Happy designing!

Let's Talk About Color: Four Color Schemes To Know And Love

Color is among the most basic and primary of elements in interior design, but somehow it ends up being the one that frightens, mystifies, and stymies people the most. Hopefully this post will ease any discomfort or anxiety you may have about working with color. If you know this information already, please bear with us as we explore hues, tints, tones, shades, and color schemes!

I am sure we all remember this from grade school, but there are three primary colors. They are called primary since all other colors are derived from combinations of these three. Red, yellow, and blue are the "original" colors.

When you combine any two of these, you get secondary colors: orange (from red and yellow), green (from blue and yellow) and purple (from red and blue).

And then if you combine these secondary colors you get--yes, you guessed it--tertiary colors! When we continually combine, the colors are more subtle, richer, and more complicated, like Red Orange or Blue Green.

Now I'd like to introduce you to an invaluable tool: the Color Wheel. You can buy one at any art supply store. It is literally a wheel that allows you to turn colors and see what combinations produce what colors. Look at the wheel below and you can see, for example, that the front side shows, at the twelve o'clock position, what happens when you mix blue with orange. At the two o'clock position, you can see what happens when you mix black with yellow: you get a sort of olive green color.

This leads us to a very handy trick when dealing with color, which is technically called a "hue." If you add white to any hue, you get a "tint," if you add grey to any hue, you get a "tone," and finally if you add black to any hue you get a "shade."

So here is where the fun comes in. Once you know the basics of color, you can apply it to interior spaces in the form of color schemes or palettes. There are four major color schemes I want to cover, and the first and simplest is the Monotone color scheme.

When we hear the word "monotone" applied to color, we tend to think of a room that has a white or neutral color palette. But a Monotone color scheme needn't mean a lack of color. In fact, it simply means a single hue, whether that hue is white, red, or even green.

Above bedroom by Anne Coyle. Photo used by kind permission.

From there we graduate to a Monochromatic color scheme which means tints, tones, or shades of a single hue. This can be used to great effect, especially when used with traditionally "calming" hues like blues or greens.

Now we can add more hues to our color schemes. An Analogous color scheme is one that uses several colors next to each other on the color wheel. You could stay calm and relaxing with a combination of yellow-green, green, blue-green, and blue. Or you could do something bold like yellow-orange, yellow, and yellow-green. Take a look at these rooms that feature exactly such schemes.

Above living room by Amy Lau.

Next up is what is known as a Complementary color scheme. Complementary refers to the fact that two hues are opposite each other on the color wheel. Look back at the color wheel above and see for yourself some classic combinations like red and green, and blue and orange. It is possible to create a very pleasing and engaging color scheme from complementary colors. In the first two examples below, you can plainly see that red and green do not automatically mean "Christmas." We have cultural and societal conditioning toward certain colors and combinations, but when red is tempered with a bit of orange, and the green is toned down, the result is actually quite sophisticated.

There are advanced color schemes like a Split-Complementary or a Tetrad, but for now I hope this tutorial about color will get you started. When you use a color wheel, it is so easy to establish a color palette using one of these four major color schemes. And here is my Design Mantra #3: there are no bad colors... color schemes can be inspired by nearly anything under the sun: a pillow, a piece of art, a garden, a favorite outfit, a place, or even a time period. But that's a post in itself...

Until then, thanks for reading and happy designing!