Tips On Choosing Paint Colors – Last year, I shared my favorite tips and tricks for choosing paint colors. I have a different opinion when it comes to choosing paint colors, some of you may have seen that article. This is my most popular post since blogging and I am always surprised to find that it is my most visited blog post every month. It just goes to show how many of us really struggle with narrowing down and choosing colors for our homes, and I hope my post helps in some way.
So today, I’ve updated that post with new paint color inspiration, and I’m reposting the tutorial to remove underlines, shadows, and areas of the correct color.
Tips On Choosing Paint Colors
This is a long post because I cover a lot of detail, but I promise that if you stick with me at the end of all six steps, you’ll find it to be a very fast and automatic process. If you go through the process of eliminating paint colors, the right color for the room will suddenly dawn on you, making the process much easier and less painful.
Ask The Builder
These little tips give you a quick way to make a color decision you’re happy with without the guesswork.
What has helped me the most when choosing paint colors is that instead of focusing on different shades of a color I like, I shift my focus and eliminate that color. I do things I don’t like. This made the process so much easier that I automatically eliminated various factors that would have illuminated my final color choice (which I’ll describe below).
When the process of elimination is complete, I’m usually left with one or two paint chips/cards of my ideal color to guide paint decisions, rather than guessing if the color is right. This process helps me keep an open mind and expand my color/shade choices, sometimes, I end up with colors / shades I never thought of in the first place!
It is important to consider a smooth color transition from one room to another, which affects the overall look of the house. This is a good starting point for narrowing down the drawing options by choosing a color similar to the color of the area around the area you want to draw. For example, if one room is light green beige and you want to paint the room next to it blue gray, choose blue gray with light green.
How I Chose My Calming Coastal Gray Wall Color — House Full Of Summer
If the next room has a strong neutral color that jumps out at you, try placing the light against a wall or facing the wall in natural light in the morning and evening. If nothing happens to you, underline “Neutral”.
All colors have undertones, but some are more subtle, and that’s where the danger comes in! A seemingly safe neutral base color can shift and fade with just a few changes in lighting. Suddenly you have what you thought was the perfect neutral beige, paint it on the wall, turn on the lights, and now you have an ugly peach wall. There!
If you’re having trouble deciding what general color to paint your space—that’s what I’m talking about—you don’t know if you want red, green, blue, etc., and need some inspiration. You need some amazing resources and inspiration. Pinterest has become a great resource for finding specific paint colors for walls and spaces. You can search by a specific wall color (if you have a paint name), or many pinners like me have paint color boards dedicated to paint colors and specific paint names.
Once you know what color you want (hopefully you have an idea of undertones), go to your paint store and pick up a card that defines your ideal color and shade. But wait! ! Now take all the shades and colors around your “ideal” color and move the paint card three shades darker/up than your original color and the next color.
Tips For Creating A Cohesive Paint Color Palette For Your Home
I choose almost every shade and shade of my color because if you think a color will never work, you always have a card with you so you can quickly see the undertones of the color later.
Choosing a color at a paint store can be a waste of time because industrial lighting isn’t even the same type of lighting in your space. The trick here is basically you recreate the same color chip/card layout as the paint shop in your own space, but with key lighting where you want it to look like this:
Next, go to the room you want to paint and use the lights in that area longer. For example, my guest bathroom has no windows, so I ended up testing the paint color with my awesome overhead vanity lighting in this space (I purposely used this terrible light to take your picture). (How light affects color)
Arrange the colors/tints in the same order as your paint cards store. You can also organize by shade – lighter at the top of the column and darker at the bottom. Build your columns with a neutral base color in the middle, moving right and left for each new column in each view:
Tips For Choosing Interior Paint Colours
If you look above, you can see that I have blue-gray neutrals in the second row from the left. On the left, you can see the card changing to a brown undertone, and on the right, the card changes to green and dark blue.
So when you see the color you set in the room lighting, remove the card with a certain base color you know you don’t need. If you know you want a certain tone, you keep these cards. If you’re not sure, keep them for now. If you want to be as safe as possible with a neutral tone, go right to the center and remove the left and right cards. When you lay out your cards this way, the safest and most subtle shades should be in the middle so they’re immediately visible.
After eliminating the undergarments in the guest bathrooms that I knew I didn’t need, I was left with about 6-9 color options:
Now that you’ve narrowed the color range and removed the tint, the next step is to remove the color. This is another simple omission. Obviously, if you want light skin tone, avoid dark ones and vice versa. For me, I want something right. So I removed the light and dark cards and put color in the middle.
Tips For Choosing Kitchen Cabinet Paint Colors
By removing the colors, I automatically reduced the selection to three colors (note again how the light in this space actually changes those colors):
I know there are many different opinions on which shade to choose, but someone once told me that one is darker for light skin and one is lighter for darker skin. I do this all the time and it usually works for me. In this case, I wanted a medium shade, which was obvious because it was the color in the middle of the card I laid out!
After running out of colors and discarding cards, you are left with only 1-3 color choices. Most of the time, when I get to this point, my ideal color is usually clear and comes out like the guest shower below:
For my guest bathroom, I chose Krypton (the color in the middle) because the color on the right is too blue and the color on the left is not blue enough. If no paint cards are laid out and my paints are shades of left and right undertones, I can’t see the difference in undertones! Imagine my disappointment when I picked up more blue on the right (rain) at the paint store and didn’t notice how blue it was!
Cool Vs. Warm
The moral of this super long story is that the only way you can see undertones clearly is to place them next to similar colors in different shades and choose a lighter color in the space.
So the final choice is really the only big decision to make.
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