Picking colors - a few tools

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein

I've always loved this quote, maybe because I've usually a bit short on both.

My wife has a new office. One of the more time consuming parts of the decorating was choosing the color scheme and paints for the interior and exterior for the building. "What do think?", she'd say with a fistful of paint swatches in her hand, "Do you like THIS combination?" How about THIS one?"

Here's a few tools to make this process easier, or at least give you a few new ideas. If you like the big picture, about how colors affect our sense of taste, appetite, medications, vision and emotions, I really like the Color Matters website. It can get you thinking about the effect of the colors and not just picking what you think looks good together (although that's OK too). If nothing else, it can tell you if you're color blind. Another good site about color theory is worqx.com because it also talks about the importance of contracts, shades, tints and hues.

As an aside, if you find you're really getting into this, you can take a look at the e-book "The Dimensions of Colour" by David Briggs. But be warned, he calls his forward "colour made difficult".

But how about something more practical? Sometimes it is helpful to look at what other people like. Color Schemer has oodles of samples in their gallery. I haven't used their software, but I love all the different combinations that are available in the gallery and please note that the gallery is searchable by keyword like "ocean" or "bamboo".

The traditional tool for picking colors is a color wheel, showing the spectrum of colors (red at one end, violet at the other) in circular form and has been around since the eighteenth century with the credit usually going to Sir Isaac Newton. Here's an example, although it is more geared towards web design colors than choosing paints and home decor. The really cool part about the color wheel is that it lets you play with the relationship between different colors.

OK, time to get playing. There are 3 basic ways to ways to choose compatible colors in a color scheme. You can go monochromatic, choosing different hues and shades of the same color (it isn't really as boring as it sounds). You can compliment, choose colors opposite each other on a color wheel (for instance, blue & yellow). This usually gives you one warm color and one cool color. Lastly, there's the triad, essentially overlaying a triangle on the wheel. You can see the effects on the Color Scheme Designer but since this tool is again made for creating web pages, you'll probably find the colors brighter than what you'll really want for your home but it does easily show the differences between these 3 techniques. If you want to see how these different techniques play out in actual home decor, HGTV has some pictures of different rooms using these techniques.

Lastly, you are always welcome to use the real, physical, pick-it-up-and-play-with-it color wheel we have at Furniture Works. Or you can just pick out whatever color you like. Hey, it's your home, I wouldn't tell you what to do (except to recommend you put more furniture from Furniture Works in it).