How To Pick the Right Color Tones

 

You've been standing in your room for hours, wondering what new color it should be. Pale yellow, sky blue, forest green, light gray or white? Forget your color preferences for the moment. Instead, pay attention to your room's outdoor surroundings.

Warm or Cool Colors?
First you need to determine what "temperature" your colors should be – warm or cool. To help in your decision, answer these questions:

Does your room have windows? Do they face: north, south, east, west or a combination?
Do you live in a warm climate or cool one?
What time of day will you use this room most?

If your room has no windows, north-facing windows or windows that are blocked by a building or a tree, it won't get direct sunlight and the natural light in your room will be cool. Avoid cool colors: blues, purples, greens, or whites/neutrals that contain those colors. To warm up your room, use color tones in the red, orange or yellow family, or whites/neutrals that contain those colors.

Warm Colors:	Cool Colors:
The top row of this graphic shows warm colors; the middle row shows warm versions of warm colors; the bottom row shows cool versions of warm colors.	The top row of this graphic shows cool colors; the middle row shows cool versions of cool colors; the bottom row shows warm versions of cool colors.
Note: Colors are directional and may vary depending on your monitor.

Sunlight casts a warm glow. If your room faces south and you live in a sunny climate, intensely warm colors can make it feel stifling. If you can't resist warm colors, use versions that contain cooler colors in their mix.

East-facing windows cast a yellow glow onto your room in the morning; west-facing windows cast an orange-red glow in the afternoon. Figure out when you're likely to spend most of your time in the room – morning or afternoon – before you commit to color tones with too much yellow/orange/red in them.

If your room is partly warm, partly cool, consider an accent wall using the complement to your favored color. The natural complement of each warm color is a cool one. Green is red's complement, blue is orange's, purple is yellow's. Intermixing colors with their complements in your fabrics and paints can create a subtly contrasting scheme.

Complement Your Room's Surroundings

Here are some other points to consider:

• Do you want to create a contrast to the color tones outside your windows, or incorporate those tones indoors?
• What mood do you want for your room?  Bright and cheerful?  Cool and peaceful?
• Is this room tucked away on its own, or can you see other rooms from inside it?

The Faces of Color Yellow = bright, sunny, warm Red = brilliant, dramatic, warm Orange = radiant, lustrous, warm Purple = moody, shadowy, cool Blue = balmy, diaphanous, cool Green = bucolic, peaceful, cool

Take note of the color tones that exist all around you, both in your natural and architectural surroundings. Are they intense and bright, or soft and muted? Do you want to copy or counter the lemony-greens of the grass, the bluer green of the shrubbery, the smoky grays of the rooftops around your home? You can pick any colors you want, but the tones that fit best have some context with your environment, by either echoing or complementing it.

Similarly, if your rooms interconnect, your colors should relate to each other, unless you're purposely aiming for a cartoon effect. This doesn't mean that all your colors need to match, but their values (their lightness/darkness) shouldn't be at opposite ends of the scale if you want a peaceful, harmonious atmosphere.

Remember, your walls constitute only one part of your room's overall color scheme. Your floors contribute 30 percent of the color in your room, as do your ceilings. Your furnishings and fabrics, as well as the wood tones around your room, also play a part in the palette. Consider each and all of these items when adjusting any one color in your scheme.

Finally, colors look different in different places. So don't just fall in love with a color in a picture or store and then rush home with yards or gallons of it. First decide which color on which item will propel your scheme, realizing that it will affect all the other colors in your room. Test a large swatch of a new color in the place it will be in your room, and review it at the relevant time of day before committing to it.

article by Sheran James