Categories: Decorating & Design

How to Choose the Right Paint Color for Your Home

Knowing how to choose the right color paint can save you a lot of time, money, and frustration. Choosing the right color paint can be a successful endeavor if you know how to look at colors. If you are one of those people who just always wonder how an artist can paint a masterpiece or you just don’t understand how interior designers pull it all together, then here is a look into how to choose a paint color 101.

Knowing how to choose the right color paint begins with understanding warm and cold colors. If this seems completely foreign to you, don’t worry. Cool paint colors have a lot of white in them, while warm colors do not. Warm colors will have warm hues of brown in them. That is as simple as I can make it. To make choosing a paint color based on this notion of warm and cold easier most paint swatches are already grouped under the headings warm and cold. When you walk up to the paint choices to your local home improvement store take a step back. Look at the overall layout of the paint swatches. You should see the heading warm, neutral, and cool. Some colors are hard to categorize as warm or cool, hence the neutral category. To help you a little further, pastels are almost always cool. They have an abundance of white in them. Pink is a cool red. You can make pink paint warm by adding hues of brown in it.

Use your existing furnishings to decide whether warm, cool, or neutral will work best in your existing décor. Always choose a paint color that compliments your furnishings, otherwise, you will never be completely happy. If you have a pale blue couch that has no hint of earth tone or brown in it, most likely it is a cool color. If you were to paint your walls in a warm color, it will fade out your couch and make it look in appropriate, cold, and uninviting. In contrast though, choosing a cool or neutral paint color will compliment the color of your sofa and carry on a light and breezy feel in your home. Earth tone, leather, and faux suede couches are super popular right now. Most of these are in warm colors. A warm paint color on the wall will enhance the design of your sofa and really pull the room together.

One of the next big helps in knowing how to choose a paint color is understanding whether you want your walls to be an accent or a neutral backdrop. If you want your paint color to make your walls blend, compliment, fade away, and continue a theme, neutral paints are the way to go. If you want the walls to pop out when you walk in a room, accent architectural features, and pick up on bits of color in your upholstery or rugs, then you want an accent color. When choosing the neutral background color or accent color be sure to keep warm and cool colors in mind. The first rule always applies when understanding how to choose paint colors.

You can incorporate both neutral paint choices and accent paint colors in the same room. Paint three walls in a neutral color and have one accent wall that adds a pop of interest and design to the room. Make this a focal wall.

Knowing how to choose a paint color is a complicated and difficult task. Even the best of us make mistakes when choosing paint colors.