Choosing a Color Scheme for Your Home

When deciding how to design your home, color can be a powerful tool that inspires emotions, creates illusions of more space or can simply be a representation of your personality. No matter your comfort level, there is a way to incorporate color into any space in your home. While a neutral color palette will always be timeless, adding a little color is a great way to energize your home and make it feel like a whole new space. Check out some of our tips below on how you can select the color scheme that is right for you!

The 60-30-10 Rule 

Decorating your space with color doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Just do what the pros do! The 60-30-20 rule is a timeless decorating rule that can be a great starting point when putting together a color scheme for your home. 60% of a primary color – This will be the main color of the room. In a living room, for example, 60% would likely be most of your walls and large accent pieces such as an area rug or a sofa. This color will serve as the backdrop for the rest of the room. 30% of a secondary color – You will want to use about half as much of your secondary color as your primary. For example, this color would be great for the curtains, accent chairs, or bed linens. 10% of an accent color – The remaining 10% will serve as the room’s accent colors. Often these colors are represented with accent pillows, lamps, or wall art.

The Color Wheel

With thousands of color options, choosing the right colors for your home can seem daunting. Most professionals learn the basics of color theory in order to quickly create flawless color schemes for their clients. The easiest way to learn this is to check out a color wheel, a tool used to show how colors relate to one another.

A successful color scheme is always going to be based on the color relationships found on a color wheel. Here are some fundamental ways you can use the color wheel to revamp your room: Complementary Colors can be found by choosing two colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. For example, orange and blue. This scheme is usually very vibrant with a high contrast of colors being that the two colors are exact opposites. A less dramatic version of this scheme is referred to as a Split-Complementary, where once you pick your complementary colors you can choose one of the colors next to it in order to create a subtler look.

Analogous Colors are three colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel, creating a very harmonious scheme. A room using blue-green, green and yellow-green is an example of this scheme. An analogous color scheme will work well with one being used as a dominant color and the other two as accents. Triad Colors are three colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel. An example of this would include green, violet and orange. Much like an analogous scheme, this works best choosing one color to dominate and the other two as accents.

For a lot of people, the thought of adding color to your home can be scary, especially if you don’t particularly have an eye for interior design. A simple and safe way to create a harmonious look in your home is to go with a monochromatic color scheme. So, if you’re only using one color, how do you keep it from overwhelming the room? In order to do this, you will want to use different tones, shades, and tints of that one color. Another great tip for adding dimension is to pick accent pieces with textures and prints of your chosen color. This will add interest to your room without sacrificing your monochromatic color scheme. By varying your one color by using different tones, shades, tints, and textures, you can keep your color scheme from appearing too monotonous. This is also a great tip for making a smaller space appear larger!

Sources: www.thespruce.com (1) www.thespruce.com (2) www.hgtv.com