Flower Love
Whether you’re a do-it-yourselfer or you want to hire professionals, you want spaces that suit your tastes and style. Every design decision you make starts with the color scheme you choose – and that can be the toughest choice of all. Instead of giving up and going back to white walls, think blue and use these ideas to organize and simplify your decisions.
Modern blues
Centering your interior palette around the blues will give your rooms a fresh, clean look that appeals to every eye, adds a rich, elegant touch, and enhances the look of your living space. From deep tones that go beyond pink-and-blue gender stereotypes to bright turquoises that are reminiscent of beautiful jewelry, the blues can create a library of colors that you carry around your home. All with a cool sophistication that gives your rooms a relaxed style.
Once you’ve decided on blue as the focus, the rest of the decor decisions need to harmonize with it. In addition to a dominant motif, your color scheme needs other shades to set accents and create special moods. How you choose these additional hues will depend on whether they create interest and excitement or add a harrowing touch to your peaceful home scene.
Search and find
Redecorating, but not replacing, every object in your home allows you to choose specific shades of blue and look for accent colors in the prints and patterns of large objects such as carpets, furniture, and artwork. Upholstery samples and other textiles, paintings and prints, vases and sculptures, even favorite flowers, can add to your decor scheme.
color theory
When you look at color, think about the three things that determine what it looks like. Its hue defines whether it looks blue, red, orange, or any other shade. Saturation ranges from vivid to matte, with completely desaturated colors turning gray.
The last component, lightness, expresses the lightness or darkness of the color. To build a library of blues or find variations on an accent color, change one of these three components at a time to get related hues that work well together.
When choosing colors, keep in mind the color wheel that expresses the rainbow. Adjacent colors on the steering wheel can create a casual, relaxed mood that works well in a bedroom. Opposite colors can add tensions that struggle with a space’s purpose.
Start Formal
Look for fun ways to use blues in the large, formal spaces of your home, including the living room, dining area, entrance, or foyer. Add a contrasting accent that moves through these rooms and can be carried over to other smaller areas, including family and media rooms, home offices, and bedrooms.
Use this accent in its lightest form in your largest rooms and implement a darker, desaturated version of it elsewhere. This is how a scarlet hue turns a cherished vase into a subdued merlot in media room pillows or bedroom paneling.
Follow the earth
Think of the interior of your home as a miniature version of the outside world, with the darkest colors on earth beneath your feet, the mid-tones at eye level in trees and bushes, and the lightest shadows above the sky. Follow this simple planning recipe to make any space attractive without shaking your brain choosing which colors to use for the interior.
The results translate the vertical balance you see around you every day, avoiding the top-heavy, compressed look of dark ceilings protruding above a light floor. To incorporate the blues into this nature-based plan, your ceilings become heaven.
Watch your wardrobe
The clothes you wear are the colors that make you feel comfortable and attractive. For example, if your skin contains olive tones, you are likely to avoid wearing yellow, and if your wardrobe deviates from light or pastel colors, these elements of your personal style can be used as a guide.
To make your room comfortable and enjoyable, pay attention to your general preferences when choosing interior colors. If you really want to recreate a color from a favorite sweater or precious bracelet, take the item to the paint shop. New color scanner technologies make it possible to digitally scan an object and create a custom color formula to match it.
Translate color fields into reality
You can use color swatches to create a real-world reference to a color scheme. Almost all paint manufacturers create color sets whose brightness ranges from a jewel-like or dark dominant color to almost transparent pastel tones. To create your own color set, cut out the shades you want from the multi-colored strips.
Despite the fact that these swatches of color accurately reflect the colors they represent, they don’t give you a complete picture of what they will look like on your walls.
The small rectangular sample on a swatch cannot convey how overwhelmingly bright a living tone would look on a large wall surface, or how muted a desaturated pastel would appear in the same spot. Use the sample-size DIY store sample containers and take a small amount of the shade you want home with you so you can apply it to a test area.
Think about moods
Individually and in combinations, colors can improve your mood and change your perspective. Some people feel rested and relaxed amid the cool, dark appearance of darker tones. The same hues make others feel gloomy and depressed without adding bright colors to evoke sunlight and add brightness.
Likewise, interior color schemes that remain entirely in a monochrome palette give some people a sense of harmony and order, while others find them too appropriate and conservative. Always consider personalities and mindsets when choosing blues or other colors to decorate your home.
The magical relationship
Rule 60/30/10 gives you a simple formula for deciding where to place each color of your interior. In this planning scheme, 60 percent of an interior is the dominant color, typically on walls that represent the largest decorative area in most rooms.
A secondary color appears on 30 percent of the room, including upholstery, drapes, rugs, and rugs. Apply an accent color to 10 percent of the space using pillows, small paintings, vases, and temporary decor items like fresh flowers.
Bedroom specialties
How you decorate your bedroom goes a long way in determining how you feel in it. Drag the blues from your upholstery or bedspread into the rest of the room to make the bed stand out, or go in the opposite direction (if you’re delving deep into a repetition of the entire room) and choose bedspreads that reflect your dominant colors .
To push your blue color scheme further, consider both shape and tone, and create or commission a custom headboard to center the space around specific shapes, fabrics, and textures. A unique bed makes a strong statement of your originality and your taste, from curved shapes to metal decorations, inlays, leather and exotic woods.
In addition to your bed, tables add elegance and functionality to a piece of furniture. For a conservative look that focuses on symmetry and balance, choose two matching tables, one for each side of the bed. To add a light-hearted charm, use reclaimed items as stands that are re-upholstered and refinished to match your blue decor.
Go to a thrift store or auction to find interesting cake safes, end tables, small chests, and stools and repeat them according to your color schemes.
Ready, Set, Go!
Experiment with your favorite blues to create a vibrant but relaxing set of interior design colors to suit your personal style. Do you have a problem or a question? Use the comments below for our professional input or give us a call for full advice.