The living room and kitchen are the most lived-in rooms of the house. When choosing a color for your living room, you want it to be pleasing and comfortable. So, where do you start? Interestingly, to choose a paint color for your living room, you don't start with the walls.
Room Elements
Choose furniture, art and area rugs for the living room before you choose the paint color. You can have a custom paint color mixed at no extra charge for any color you like. Just take a piece of anything with the color you want to the paint store and they will mix the paint to it. It is not so simple to do this in reverse by trying to match the other items in the room with the paint color.
Choose three colors out of the room's elements that you feel would make good wall paint choices. If you have a print in your sofa, fabric chairs or area rug, you might choose the background color as one choice. However, if most of the elements in the living room are a solid color, choosing the same color for the wall paint will cause your furnishings to melt into the background. You might want to choose a contrasting color that is only in small amounts within the room's elements. You can then splash that color throughout the room with sofa pillows, vases or other decorative items. Let's look at how combinations of colors affect the look and feel of a living room.
Using the Color Wheel
A color wheel will help you make a final choice about your living room wall paint colors. You will see through color wheel pairings how your previous choices will create individually different atmospheres.
Analogous colors blend together, creating a cohesive tonal range within the room. They include colors that are set next to each other on the color wheel. For example, if other elements in your room are primarily in the beige area, you could choose a yellow or orange tone to liven up the room, yet the colors would blend, also.
Complementary colors are those that are opposite on the color wheel. The colors complement each other, yet they are widely contrasted as well. This would cause the walls as well as the other main elements in your room to stand out. So, in a complementary color scheme, with your beige room elements, you might choose a blue or blue-violet paint for your living room walls.
Triad color schemes are chosen by mentally placing a triangle over the color wheel. These choices will give you a varied, but balanced appearance to the living room. By placing one point of the triangle on beige, you would choose a wall color in the blue-green or red-violet color range. Whichever you chose, you would use the alternate choice in choosing accessories for the room.
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