Choosing Interior Paint
Colors From Decor

Today we'll talk about choosing interior paint colors, and we will use your existing decor as a guide to help us find the best paint colors for your home.

So take a look around the room: what elements will not be changing? Is it your furniture, rugs, bedspreads, art/paintings, lamp shades or your favorite vase? You can use them for color ideas!

Choosing Interior Paint Colors
From Rugs and Fabric

The left photo is a great example of how easy it can be to choose colors to paint a room: here the idea for the paint color came from the ottoman and decorative pillow. The neutral colors of the rug, flooring and furniture just stay in the background, allowing the main color to unfold.

In the photo on the right, the rug clearly determined the wall color. Notice that the furniture upholstery also has blue, ranging from very light to navy. So why did they use the rug and not the upholstery as an inspiration for choosing paint color? Because the rug offers the largest amount of blue - thus it established a primary shade for the room, and now serves as a backdrop that unifies all the other shades.

Here, the paint color was pulled from the yellow shades of the window treatments and flowers on the bed linens. The result is a warm, cheerful and sunny room. As an alternative, if you wanted to cool down the reds and yellows of the fabrics, you could try choosing a paint color from the soft green leafs on the linens as the wall color.

The dominant colors of the decor in the right photo are gray and pink - they are present in the fabric, rug and paintings. To stay within the same color scheme, both these colors (their muted shades) were used on the walls - a decorative painting technique made it possible.

Choosing Interior Paint Colors
From Art/Paintings

Picking interior paint colors from artwork and paintings is as simple as painting by numbers. In the example on the right, the painting was used as a complete color scheme for the room. The violet became the wall color, while the orange and gold determined the color of decorative accent pieces.

Pulling a wall color from the painting in the left photograph was a little trickier - the shades seem to blend into one another. This blended effect was imitated on the accent wall, while the other walls received a solid color.

Look closely: there is just a hint of green in these paintings in the last photo, but the decorator was able to detect it and use it as a clue for paint color.

Do you get the idea? If you are a novice, you'll find this method the easiest. All you need to do is look around for color inspiration. Try it and you will agree that choosing interior paint colors is much easier when you have some kind of a starting point.

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