If you are looking to repaint your home, use these tips and tricks to find the best paint colors for your space.

1. How to Choose the
Best Paint Colors for
Your Home
Eugene Chrinian

2. How to Choose the Best Paint Colors for
Your Home
• It is amazing the effect a simple coat of paint can have on an entire
room; it can highlight subtle architectural features and even evoke
certain emotions. The ability to dramatically impact spaces makes
paint color one of the most crucial design choices that you can make.
As such, it is important that you make the right decision before even
picking up the paintbrush. Read on for a few tips that will help you
choose the best paint colors for your home:

3. Learn the terminology
• Before you can begin looking at paint colors, you should learn the
various terms that come with the project. Another word for color is
“hue,” which refers to the shade itself. Blue, yellow, and red are all
hues that you can apply to your walls. The term “saturation” places a
value on a color and dictates its overall dominance. If you want less-
saturated colors, then you should opt for pastels over more vibrant
hues. It is also important to know the term “intensity.” Color
combinations such as yellow-green or yellow-orange will always be
less intense than unmixed hues like red. You can use your knowledge
of these terms to choose the colors that will help create the look you
want.

4. Look at a color wheel
• You don’t need to be a color expert if you want to formulate beautiful
palettes for a room. All you will need is a simple color wheel to
determine which hues pair well with one another and which
combinations you should avoid. A color wheel features the primary,
secondary, and tertiary colors that you can use to paint your home,
but it also provides an easy guide for color matching. When looking
at the wheel, you will find hues that sit opposite one another, such as
red and green. These colors are called complementary colors, and
together they make an eye-pleasing palette. If these hues provide too
much contrast for your taste, then you can use “approximate
opposites,” such as red and yellow-green, to tone down the intensity.

5. Follow what is trendy
• If you do not know where to begin with paint colors, then you can
always turn to the current design trends for inspiration. You can
follow some of the more classic trends, such as using whites and
blues to adorn the kitchen, or use more modern styles when
formulating your color palette. In recent years, many homeowners
have begun implementing sustainable interior decorating practices,
and they’ve reflected this styling method in their paint colors as well.
As such, stone-like tones, earthy browns, and vibrant greens are very
on-trend. However, interior design trends are constantly changing
and colors continue to go in and out of style, so you will always have
fresh inspiration to help guide your own paint color choices.

6. Maintain a balance
• If you intend to use more than one paint color in any given room,
then it is crucial that you do not go overboard with too much
intensity. When using two vibrant colors, you should always pick a
third neutral hue to create a more harmonious space. A few classic
trios include plum, orange, and white and red-brown, teal, and grey.
While you can use all three colors on your walls, another way to
balance a room is to use your brightest hues as wall color and offset
this brilliance with neutral furnishings. No matter how you choose to
use your paint colors, you should ensure that they all work together.

7. Pick your colors last
• One of the most common mistakes that homeowners make when
choosing paint is basing their entire decorating project off of their
first color. In fact, your paint color should be the very last design
choice that you make. It is more important to begin any redesign by
planning the rest of the room first. Select your furnishings, choose
your fabrics, and buy your decorations before even looking at paint
swatches. Why? It is much easier to take the color of a pillow or
couch and turn it into a wall color than it is to find furnishings that
will match your chosen paint.

8. Create a mood
• There is a connection between certain colors and emotions, so you
should determine what feeling you wish to bring to a space before
selecting your paint. For example, you may want to create a serene
atmosphere in a bedroom, to help you relax. The color that best
elicits this emotional response is green, which perfectly brings
together the brightness of a yellow space and the serenity of a blue
one. Another common paint choice is red, which evokes feelings of
excitement and intensity. For this reason, this hue most popularly
appears in living and dining rooms. In general, you should follow a
simple mood rule: cool tones for a calm room and warm tones for a
lively one.

9. Test before committing
• Before you make your final color decision and start painting, you
should first test your choices to ensure that they appear as you have
envisioned. Swatches will let you see how certain colors and finishes
will look on your walls. First, you should invest in a test size and
apply a patch of it to a large area. Once it dries, keep looking at it
throughout the day to see how its hue and sheen change with the
daylight. If you don’t want to apply paint to your walls, then you can
always take home a large paint chip and tape it to your wall until
you decide whether you like it or not.