Residential interior painting – Creating a whole-house color palette.

Can you decorate a house using paint only? You bet! Most people either don’t use multiple paint shades when they’re painting, so the resulting work tends to look “flat.” Interior painting that takes advantage of multiple colors in a palette can really change the look and feel of a home.

Unless you’ve got a real flair for mixing colors, you probably don’t know how to put together a paint palette. Paint advertisements are famous for making a model room look outstanding. Unfortunately, unless you live in a studio apartment or a tiny house, most people don’t have the luxury of working with a single room when planning an interior paint project! In the context of a whole house, finding a paint scheme that flatters every room can make a real difference in your home’s interior appearance.

So how do you put together a paint palette for an entire house?

Monochromatic colors

Some people choose to work with several different shades of the same color. A monochromatic paint palette is an honorable way to go when you have a lot of space to work with. Staying within a narrow range of colors ensures that all your rooms look good together, but it can be tiring on the eyes. If you can stand to be adventurous, selecting complementary colors can give your rooms a real lift.

Complementary colors

The visible color spectrum is known as a “color wheel.” In geometry, round things are measured in degrees, and a circle has 360 degrees. Each primary color occupies its own section of the color wheel. The primary colors are 120° away from each other. If red is at 0°, yellow is at 120° and blue is at 240°. The colors between 0° and 120° are combinations of red and yellow. Red and yellow intersect equally at 60° to form orange. The colors between yellow and blue do the same thing between 120° and 240°, and blue and red combine between 240° and 0°.

Colors that are directly opposite each other on the color wheel are called complementary colors. Red and green are complementary colors, as are yellow and purple, and blue and orange. Choosing a primary base color for your whole house palette and accenting with complementary colors is one way to add some spice to your color scheme.

Analogous colors

While complementary colors sit directly across the color wheel from each other, analogous colors are neighbors on the wheel. Orange and purple are analogous colors for red. They’re not opposite of their primary colors, but they’re comfortably close to each other and can work well together.

Creating a whole house color palette certainly requires choosing colors that can get along with each other, but you also want to choose the right shades and put the color in the right places!