Color experts share their foolproof paint palettes When choosing a paint color for any room in your house, you should think of the wall as the blank canvas of a painting. "Any artist will tell you that the background color sets everything else up," says Gretchen Schauffler, founder of the paint line Devine Color. "It sets up the temperature, the depth, the mood, and the atmosphere for all the other colors to be layered and featured."
In other words, choosing the right wall color will make or break your room, and given the thousands of paints on the market, it can be a daunting task. We asked two color experts, Schauffler and Puji Sherer, to help simplify the decision-making process.
An artist by trade, Schauffler started her paint line in 1998 out of her Portland garage, and Devine Color?s 136 hues are now manufactured and distributed by Valspar. Sherer is the President and Chief Color Nerd at Colorhouse Paint, a line of 128 shades crafted for interiors from a non-toxic formula. They offered tips for selecting a personal color palette, as well as some of their favorite schemes.
1. Consider light and scale
Sherer says it?s important to remember that not all colors look good on a larger plane. "Something that?s different about architectural color, is that you have to consider scale," she says.
To do this, pick a color with undertones?Sherer describes them as "the colors that are not necessarily primary when you?re looking at the col...