What color should I select for my____________ fill in the blank? The question simple enough to ask but hard to answer. What is your favorite color? What color will work best? Do I want the room to be warm and cozy or cool and serene? Do I want to reproduce the period that the home was built? Can I live with this mustard color after the trend for passes? Here are some ways to pick a color pallette that will work for everyone.
The old tried and tested search. Dig through magazines and tear out the pages that catch your eye. After you have a number of selections break down the rooms to only color. You will be surprised that most of the time your rooms will have the same colors. Also the colors in the room will number only four or five colors each. You also will notice that each of your selections will have a predominant color that will be nuetral (brown, beige, and white).
Also take note that the percentage of color will vary. Half the room will be one color with the remainder percentage will be split between other colors. Fifty percent Ivory with ten percent blue, ten percent lemon, twenty percent choclate, and maybe ten percent that coloryou’ve always loved (silver? Per chance). The percentages are not locked in stone so give your self-a break and be flexible.
Remember the color wheel. Who did that? How about the color triangle? The three basic colors are red, yellow, and blue. Now take all the nuetral colors you can think of: white, black, grey, brown, and metallic silver, gold, etc. Now to give you some selections, take the three basic colors and mix two of them together. Red and blue will make purple. Take the purple and add a little black! Take the purple and add white. The values change and guess what happens? Depending on how much you add (of any each color) will get hundreds of combinations. To take this a step further, you have purple, blue, red, red purple, blue purple, dark purple, etc. A room full of color! Dark blue floors, an accent purple (plum) wall. Red pillows on a white couch and a black lamp with a silver shade. Not your colors? Try green, yellow and blue! Try red and yellow when mixed become orange. Orange leans toward brown. Brown, ivory, grey complimented by blue. You can work out a great color board to make it warm, peaceful and dramatic
Go shopping and leave your credit cards at home. This expedition is to gather information. Ask your friend, sister, date to go with you they can be helpful. You know whom to ask. The card shop will have an assortment of cards that will stimulate a pallette of colors. An artist has spent a lot of time figuring out his composition. These colors work together. Select some for reference. Posters, paintings, even store windows will inspire you. The home store will have brochures with color swatches collect them.
Match! Go to the fabric store and check out how colors work together in the patterns. Are they suttel? Bold? Take a multicolored fabric and pick the least noticable color and take that fabric and hold it up against another fabric of that color (the least noticed) you will see that they will work together. The one color will bind those two fabrics together.
