Do you ever wonder how interior decorators have the ability to create such nice whole-house colour palettes effortlessly?
Get your technique right to manipulate space with colour. Use our practical skills and colour theory to add personality and interest with creating a visual focal point to anchor your colour scheme, so you can translate this into your own home.
Colour is the most powerful tool in a designer's kit. You can use colour to manipulate the sense of a space in a room and literally change the visual dimensions. Colour can super-size a room or it can shrink a room. It can even change a room's proportions by making it feel wider, narrower, taller or shorter.
One of the most important things to understand about colour, is colour temperature. Refer to a colour wheel, half the colours are warm and the other half are cool. Colour theory for designers and artists, including interior designers, is that warm colours feel closer (advance) and cool colours feel further away (recede).
As warm colours and cool colours are opposites, they appear to clash. This is easier to see when you view a warm and cool colour side by side. You can literally see the behaviour of the colour. But it's important to remember that opposites attract!
It's also interesting to note that colours, by definition, are deceptive. They play differently in the company of other colours. If you place two warm colours side by side one colour will advance and one will recede. It's all about the colour context because one colour will always be warmer or cooler than the other.
The other big factor that effects our perception of colour distance is saturation.
Colour saturation is simply about how bright or pure a colour is. How much colour is in your colour? Another way to think about it is that a saturated colour is a full colour, it has not been altered with white, black or grey to become a tint, shade or tone. So, a bright warm colour or dark cool colour will advance, or feel closer.
The beauty of colour theory is that you can wave the magic colour wand and easily manipulate your space. The best rooms are always the ones that do things a little unexpectedly, so don't play it safe but experiment with colour!
The easy and most economical way to spruce up your home is by having a statement front door. Your front door is the first opportunity to influence the world around you so harness this opportunity to make a bold statement. Please note: The more detailed the architecture of the door the bolder the colour needs to be to demand attention and to become a focal point.
The great thing about your neutral exterior is that the red paint, by example, can be as red as you dare! Also check the undertones in colours with large samples tested on site, in different light levels throughout the day. Gloss enamel is the toughest finish for a front door but you need to use the correct prep to re-coat subject to existing paint, always ask advice.
Go for it and fashion forward your front door as your number one project.
*All Interiors in my Blog posts like colours, materials, furniture and styling were sources, supplied and designed by Kaamer Design*
Love colour
Ruth x