Looking through decorating magazines, you can see that a dramatic color on the walls can unify the various pieces of art in a room. When deciding what color to choose when decorating your home with art, knowing a little about color theory, color psychology and color symbolism can be a big help. Learning how light and mood affect color is good to know about, too.
The most important thing in choosing a color for a room is to decide what color inspires you. Different colors create different moods. Use your own sense of style and aesthetics.
If you want to create a mood with a particular historical decorating style – like Art Deco, Italian Renaissance or even mid-century modern, follow the colors used in the furnishings and artwork from those eras. Go to a museum and take note of the colors on the walls. You can follow the look throughout your home with your artwork and frames if you want to keep to a theme.
Color symbolism and color psychology can contribute to how we select color in a room. It’s fascinating to learn why dining rooms work best with warm colors and bedrooms work best in quiet, serene colors. Some of the leading paint companies websites have some good reading material on these topics.
Keep it simple by using one prevailing color and then perhaps one or two accent colors. For color harmony, variations on complimentary colors like red and green, yellow and purple and blue and orange tend to work well in a room.
Try to understand the way colors work by studying a color wheel. Remember learning in school about primary (red, yellow and blue), secondary, and tertiary colors? Well, now you can apply those rules to decorating with art.
Fine art photographs look good on any background color. Traditionally, photo galleries were always painted a pristine white, but now just about anything goes as decorating styles have become more eclectic and personal.
Once you’ve considered all the factors, bring home paint chips from your local paint store. Study them at different times of the day in the room because light will affect how the color will look in the room.
Then, buy a quart of a color or two and test them on the walls or on poster size foam core, and study them in the light again.
And if the idea of four walls of red overwhelms you, try just painting one wall of that color first. Sometimes all you need is one wall of intense color for your art and the other walls can be white.
