How to select interior paint colors

July 8, 7:30 PMDallas Interior Decorating ExaminerNancy Baldwin

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Flickr: Architectural Interior by Kyle Dreier (Since 1966)

One of the first things you notice when you walk into a room is color – the color of the walls, the color of the flooring and the color of the furnishings. Color attracts attention and sets a mood. It’s an expression of a homeowner’s taste and a reflection of his personality.

Clearly one of the most important decisions a person will make when decorating his home is how he’ll use color. Yet selecting paint color seems to be universally painful – often confusing and especially time-consuming. Here are a few tips to take the pain away and make picking color less difficult.

Walk through your home and consider how each room makes you feel. What is the mood you want to create? A dining room will become formal with a deep, rich color, yet will reflect a casual, sociable atmosphere with contrasting or bright colors. A bathroom will become a quiet spa with soft, cool colors and neutrals or become a dramatic retreat with strong colors.

Next, take inspiration from the fabrics and accessories in the room. Is there an accent color you just love and want to enhance? A coordinated color palette can be created by selecting a paint color which picks up the subtle nuances and accents already existing in furnishings within the room.

Consider the adjacencies of the rooms. Remember that from each room you will be able to see one or more other rooms. How will the colors interact with each other? Will the color flow? The rooms can be unified by using a common color palette and separate and distinct spaces created by changing the shade and color within the palette.

O.K., now that you have some colors in mind, head out to your local paint store and pick up some free color chips or purchase some actual samples of the paint. Test your samples on a large poster board or section of a wall.

Look at the color a various times of day and night when the light in the room will be different. Turn light fixtures on and off. Incandescent light is warm and brings out yellow tones while fluorescent light is cool and casts a blue tone. Natural daylight shows the truest color.

Don’t forget about ceilings. Painted ceilings can completely change the ambiance of a room by adding visual interest with contrasting or complementary color. Also, crown molding, window frames and other special accents can be emphasized with lighter or darker contrasting paint.

Major paint manufacturers offer online virtual color centers which give you the ability to play with paint colors in virtual rooms. Check out behr.com, sherwin-williams.com, benjaminmoore.com, and valspar.com.

My next article will discuss trends in paint color.  To be alerted to this article when it's published, click on the "Subscribe to Email" link at the top of this page.