A good sense of colour is essential if your interior decor is to be a success. Apart from the technical skills involved in painting and paper hanging, you need to be able to combine colours and patterns for maximum appeal. With a little care you can choose a colour scheme that will add greatly to the beauty and comfort of your home. Before starting to decorate your home, you should spend some time considering various colour schemes. When choosing colours that go well together there are no real hard and fast rules to bear in mind, and there is no such thing as a good or bad colour. People’s reactions to colour vary tremendously, and your feelings about a particular combination of colours might be quite different from someone else’s. The kind of colour scheme you choose will depend very much on the use to which a particular room is to be put. For instance, a good colour scheme for a study might be mainly brown-dark leather chairs with mahogany furniture and woodwork. The walls could be a cream or light chocolate colour, and the carpet a plum colour. Silver ware could be placed around on shelves, or in a glass fronted cupboard. With this sort of colour scheme the effect will be of solid and subdued comfort. This kind of colour scheme is ideal for a room like a study. In rooms where you relax for lengthy periods of time the emphasis should be on cheerful yet unobtrusive colours. Try not to be too influenced by the latest fashion in colours. Many people have followed the latest trends slavishly-often with disastrous results. Your own tastes, combined with careful judgment, are far more important. When discussing colour schemes, the main concern is how to combine different colours successfully. It is here that you will benefit on how to get the most out of your personal preferences.
Colour properties
A very great deal has been written about the theory of colour. Before choosing a colour scheme for a particular room you should know about the basic properties of colour. These are hue, tonal value and chromatic intensity. Hue is the quality which distinguishes one colour from another-red and blue for example. Black, neutral greys, and white have no hue. There are three basic groups of colour primary, secondary and tertiary. The colours in the primary group are red, yellow and blue. By mixing any two of these together you can get orange, green and purple. These are the secondary colours. Tertiary colours are mixtures of primary and secondary colours-adjacent to each other on the colour wheel. They are yellow green, blue green, blue violet, red violet, red orange and yellow orange. Altogether, twelve colours go to make the colour wheel, This will be of considerable help to you when working out possible colour combinations. Tonal value refers to the lightness, or darkness, of a colour. For example, yellow is lighter than all but the palest of violets. Light tones are more reflective than darker colours. This is why dark rooms are made brighter by the use of light coloured paints. On the other hand, rooms with large windows, with plenty of access to sunshine, will remain light and cheerful even with a very dark colour scheme. A colour scheme made up of subtle tone changes will make a room seem larger and play down the appearance of awkward shaped furniture. Such a scheme will give a quiet overall effect. You should pick out something in an opposite shade to the general colour scheme. This will provide a point of interest and prevent the room be,coming boring. Strong tonal contrasts catch the eye. Your furniture wilt stand out where such a colour. scheme is used. A contrast between the walls and curtains will make a room look much smaller. The reason for this is that the different surfaces will be ‘cut up’, or separated. You’ll find that the effect can be pleasantly lively and stimulating. An understanding of tone is one way of making sure that you use colour attractively. Two colours which do not seem to combine satisfactorily may well do so when one of them is lightened or darkened.