Choosing your colour palette for your home is one of the most exciting tasks to do, if you know what you are doing. However it quickly can become a nightmare for you with the wrong approach. You might be unsure of where to start, you might not know how to combine colours or you might start overthinking…. Does that sound like you? Keep reading as I show you how to tackle this big task.
Do you believe choosing colours is something for creatives? And you think you are not particularly creative? Even in decorating we follow processes that make our life much easier. So it is with choosing your perfect colour scheme. There is a process you can follow and you can learn how to read colours by knowing the basics and lots of practice. I’m introducing you today to a 4-Step-System on how you can choose your own colour palette successfully.
1. Scrapbook Your Ideas
This does not have to be the traditional way of scrapbooking if you don’t enjoy cutting out images from magazines. The easiest way is to create a Pinterest account and get started. Just type in a few key words related to your room or task and Pinterest comes up with a whole lot of images and suggestions for you. The images you like, you then can pin to your board. Once you are happy with the amount of inspirational pictures you start sorting them out again. Move your most liked pictures to another board to narrow down your choices. After that you are ready for the next step!
2. Identify your preferred colours
Do you notice a pattern on the images you’ve been choosing? Is there a colour you kept pinning to your board? Or is there a particular colour you absolutely love? This colour doesn’t necessarily have to be your wall colour. This can be the colour of your accent pieces in the room or if you wanting a little more colour this could be the colour of some furniture pieces.
You can create contrasting and interesting colour palettes with complementary colour schemes. This is my favourite way of creating colour palettes. It always uses a warm and a cool colour which creates a nice balanced colour scheme. These colours complement each other:
- yellow and purple
- orange and blue
- red and green
Don’t panic, it does not have to be too bold! Take those colours and choose tints and shades of it. I absolutely love subtle colours which have a node to earthy tones. For your wall colour and your largest furniture pieces select some white’s, grey’s, beige’s and greige’s. If you would like to learn how to specifically pick white paint colour – read this post!
3. Choose your colour samples
Now is the time to go and visit your local paint store. How exciting! But what’s next?
Okay, head over to the big colour wall where the store displays loose paint chips for you to take home. To help you overcome the overwhelming feeling, just focus on the section with all white paints and natural paints. Take your favourite colour chips home to get a feel for the colour in your space. This is very important as colours change with the amount of light they receive in a room. Your colour might appear much brighter in rooms with lots of natural light than in rooms with minimal natural light.
TIP: The rooms which are quite shady all day long you might want to go for half or quarter strength of your chosen colour.
4. Compare your samples with your fittings, fixtures and furnishing
I love this stage of selecting colours… Now you start seeing the bigger picture.
After you have taken home multiple paint swatches it is time to narrow down your choices even more. You want to end up with about 2 – 3 paint swatches that are in harmony and balance with your fittings, fixtures and furnishing.
Have you made a decision on your three finalists? Great job, well done. The next step is to go back to the paint store and purchase a sample pot of each colour. Why? This is the tried and true method of making sure you will love your paint colour in your home. The small paint swatches are already great but sample pots are even better.
My next TIP is to brush out those colours on large white cardboard pieces. The emphasis is on white cardboard! Brown cardboard would not show the true colour, as the brown will shine through.
Why not directly on the wall? Different paint colours on the wall will affect your final result. You might still see the outlines of the patches or the other colours can still shine through.
Another advantage of using cardboard pieces is that you can move them around in your room and look at it from different angles.
Almost there…
Finally you can observe each paint colour during the different stages of the day and at night in artificial lighting. This should help you to get to a conclusion. I hope this article was helpful – I’m always happy to hear from you. Are you time poor and would like some help choosing your perfect colour scheme? Book a free Connect & Explore call here.
