How to Create a Paint Scheme for a Room

A paint scheme is a plan for the paint colors to be used in your interior design. Color is one of the more important elements in your design, and paint provides a good deal of color to your room. Creating a paint scheme is more than just choosing a color for your walls. It will help you create a cohesive interior design for your room. There are four types of paint schemes you can use: monochromatic, complementary, adjacent and triadic.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Color wheel

How to Create Paint Scheme for a Room

1. Assess the furnishings that you want to use in the room. Determine the color that is dominant among the fabrics, artwork and accessories you want to use. For example, if you find that your furnishings have varying shades of green, green is the color you start with.

2. Use a color wheel to find the complementary color to your primary color, that is, the color that lies opposite on the color wheel. The complementary color for green is red.

3. Use the color wheel again to determine adjacent colors. These are the colors to the left and right of the primary color. For green, those colors are yellow-green and blue-green.

4. 

   Determine the triadic colors using the color wheel. These will be the three colors that are equidistant from each other on the color wheel. For green, these colors would be violet and orange.

5. Start your scheme using the tone of the color wheel that most closely matches the shade of color mostly used in your fabrics, artwork and accessories. In the example used here, green, the primary color may be blue-green, yellow-green or shades closer to blue or to yellow.

6. Create a monochromatic scheme by choosing a mid-range shade of your primary color for your walls. Choose a shade lighter or darker than your primary color for the trim, door and window sashes.

7. Create a complementary color scheme by choosing the primary color on your walls and the complementary color for your trim, door and window sashes.

8. Create an adjacent color scheme by choosing the primary color for your walls, one adjacent color for your trim and the other for your door and window sashes. In this plan, you can also choose just one adjacent color and use it for your trim, door and window sashes.

9. Create a triadic color scheme by choosing the primary color for your walls, and one of the triadic colors for your trim, the other for the door and window sashes.

10. Go to the paint store and collect paint sample cards, commonly referred to as paint chips. These are usually free to customers. For a monochromatic scheme, collect all the paint chips for your primary color. For a complementary scheme, gather paint chips for both your primary and complementary colors. Collect the appropriate colors for the scheme that you've decided to use.

11. Lay out the paint chips and determine which colors best suit your paint scheme. Once you've made your decision, purchase the paint and follow your paint scheme to complete the project.

Tips & Warnings

• You can start your scheme using a color that isn't a dominant color in your furnishings. Choose a color that you wish to emphasize in your design, but practice creating schemes using a dominant color as this will teach you how to differentiate varying tones.