How to Pick Perfect Paint Colors

How many times have you walked into someone’s house and loved the color of the walls, then realized that you would never in a million years thought of using that paint color with that rug or sofa? It might have been their pure decorating talent, or they might have used a method like mine for finding the perfect colors.

Here’s what I call “The good, the bad, and the ugly” method of selecting colors. Visit paint stores and the paint department of home improvement centers and take as many paint color sample chips as you can. Take one of every color the paint department has. Then go to another paint store and take one sample chip of every color they have.

• Don’t pick colors in the store – you will pick colors in the house, in the room you will be painting.
• Don’t look at paint chips in isolation – the apparent color of the chips will change as their surroundings change.
• Don’t censor your color selections ahead of time – you want to be surprised by random combinations.

You will be selecting paint by looking at the color chips lying on one or more major items of dÃ?©cor. Decide what you want to use first: carpet, counter, sofa, wood, bedding, tile, etc. We’ll call this the “target”. Find a location with light similar to the light you will use in the room you plan to paint.

Get rid of the bad and the ugly

1. If you collected any strips composed of different colors, cut them apart into single colors.

2. Shuffle the collection of color chips thoroughly. The easiest way to do this is to put them in a bag and shake the bag.

3. Grab a few chips out of the bag and scatter them on the target, colored side up. Some colors will look ugly against the target … put them in the reject pile. Some colors will look adequate to amazingly good … put all of these in the “OK” pile.

4. Do this for all of the color chips, making only one decision with each chip: does this color look good or bad with this object. Don’t worry about how that color will look with anything else, don’t worry about whether it is too light or dark for walls, and don’t be too picky. If you aren’t sure about a color, call it “OK”.

5. Repeat step 4 with the other major targets, using only the colors that were OK with the first object. You can see that the large stack that was OK with the carpet will have some colors that are discarded because they look ugly with the sofa, and more will be discarded because they look bad with the drapes. Your stack of OK colors will shrink steadily.

Judge the good against each other to find the best

You have finished weeding out the colors that don’t look good with your targets. Now it’s time to go through the survivors and start making judgments among the colors. You should finish with a collection of 20-30 paint chips, from light to dark, that look good with your dÃ?©cor. Some of them might be colors you would have chosen, but some may be colors you would have ignored in the paint store.

1. Shuffle the paint chips again.

2. Grab 10 chips out of the OK pile and scatter them on the first target, colored side up. From this group, discard the 3 colors you like the least.

3. Keep discarding 3 of 10 colors until you have judged all of the OK group against the first target.

4. Take the ones you thought were best and repeat the process with the second target, then the third.

5. Shuffle the paint chips and repeat the process until you only have 20 to 30 chips left.

This is your personally selected color palette. From these colors, you should be able to pick a wall color, accent colors, and even a color for your table linens. Now you can go through the decision of light walls, dark walls, bright walls, muted walls … but at least you know that whatever color you select, your walls will look good with the sofa.