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.
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.
|
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
|
|
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?
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.
