Decorating with Color – Creating Color Palates

Color Palettes

Professional decorators and designers aside, decorating can be extremely difficult. It can even be difficult for the professionals at times.

It’s one thing to furnish a home and outfit it with the right accessories; which can be hard enough. Having to decorate it from scratch is an entirely different story.

When it comes to decorating with color, the biggest concern is often what colors should I use together and how many colors should I use.

For more on decorating with color, see Decorating with Color – Color Theory.

Make the task a bit easier by creating color palettes. A couple of different color palette types include analogous, complementary and tone-on-tone.

Not the adventurous type? Then tone-on-tone may be a suitable route. To create this color pattern, simply choose a color you like. Then, create variations of that color by adding white to create lighter shades and black to create darker shades. It won’t be the most striking palette, but it works if subtlety is what you’re after.

Analogous color palettes consist of colors that are next to each other on the color wheel (ex. blue, green and yellow). Using different hues and shades of these colors creates a nice, dependable balance.

Complementary color palettes can be created by selecting colors that are positioned opposite of each other on the color wheel. Blue and orange, red and green, etc. Keep in mind that white and black can be added to these colors to expand the range of hues available.