Home > Paint > Selecting a color scheme

AIl color schemes begin with a vision. You want a blue dining room. A red house. A yellow nursery. But after that, what?

Look at the blue dining room, for instance, and consider

several approaches.

Monochromatic: Do the entire room in shades of blue.

You might choose light-blue walls and deep-blue trim.

Analogous: Paint the walls that same light blue, but choose a trim color from one of blue’s adjacent slices of the wheel.

Complementary: If blue-on-blue proves overpowering, add a touch of its complementary color, the one directly opposite on the color wheel. The complement of blue is orange; instead of painting the trim orange, you might add the color with a brass chandelier or terra-cotta upholstery on the furniture. Either way, the two colors work together to spark up the room.

Triadic: For more variety, choose triadic colors-those that are equidistant from each other on the wheel. Tints and shades of blue, red, and yellow are shown. Garish? Not if you choose an abstract painting or a neutral rug with small bits of these colors.

There are also other ways to simplify choosing a color scheme.

Consider pulling colors from a favorite fabric or a rug. Or use a painting as inspiration for an entire room. Some perennially popular color combinations are classic: blue and white, blue and yellow, or red-white-and-blue, for instance. Paint manufacturers have helped make your choices easier with brochures showing shades that go together. Some even offer sample-size containers or stick-on color patches so you can test a color on your walls.