Of all the principles of interior design, color is perhaps the most scary. A color that looks good as a small sample can look dreadful when it covers an entire wall. New designers often assume that color is purely a matter of personal preference, but the most attractive interiors are often the result of harmonious color choices. When you learn to notice the interplay between different colors, the furniture, and lighting, you can begin to choose colors wisely rather than by chance.
For a simple example, try this experiment. In a small area of a room, set three items on a table or shelf near a window. The items can be a scrap of fabric, a book cover, or a decorative object in the room already. Study the colors for a few moments. Does one seem to make another color look warmer? Does one stand out while the other two recede? This simple exercise can help you learn to see colors in relation to each other.
One of the most common problems is using too many bright colors in the same room. Novice designers often think that each element in a room needs to be exciting. As a result, the walls, furniture, and accessories are all loud and vying for attention. The fix is simple: let one of the colors be the star of the show and let the others be more subdued. A brightly colored couch can dominate the space, but the other elements don’t have to compete with it.
Here is a fifteen-minute exercise you can try every day. Pick an object in a room, like a chair or a pillow, and imagine that it is going to be the starting point for the room’s color scheme. Then look around the room to see if other objects in the space share a similar color or feeling. You will begin to see a color scheme take shape. With practice, you will be able to start with something in a room and build a color scheme around it, rather than throwing colors together at random.
More than any other factor, natural light will impact the way colors in your room look. A wall color that looks light in the morning will look darker at night. Take a few minutes to go back and look at the same space in your home at different times of day and see how the colors change. As you practice this, you will learn to pick colors that work well together and that will help create a beautiful room, rather than a space that just happens to look okay.