YOUR GUIDE TO COLOUR CONFIDENCE

YOUR GUIDE TO COLOUR CONFIDENCE

While taking risks with a bright or dark colour is second nature to me, I can appreciate how much of a daunting task it can be, especially if you’re used to living with white walls. Many people think if you have a smaller space, darker shades won’t work but this isn’t necessarily correct. There are always ways you can introduce deep and inky bottom-of-the-lake hues into your home in a way that won’t constrict your pad. I’ve listed a few ways below on how to gain your colour confidence.Start by picking a colour for your biggest room – say your living room or kitchen. Choose a hue that feels beautiful and inspiring, and true to what you love. Build on this to create a limited palette of colours for your entire home, using different combinations of those colours in each room. 

1. Start by picking a colour for your biggest room – say your living room or kitchen. Choose a hue that feels beautiful and inspiring, and true to what you love. Build on this to create a limited palette of colours for your entire home, using different combinations of those colours in each room.

2. Think about what you want your home to communicate to the outside world. No one will be talking about your beige-on-beige home, so go a little crazy. Be reckless, I say! The more your confidence grows, the more you’ll feel like experimenting with colour.

3. Use colour in unexpected places: behind closed doors, inside kitchen cupboards, bedroom wardrobes, the loo – all those tucked away places that surprise the minute you enter.

4. Remember the small stuff. Introduce colour through cushions, vases, bowls, fruit, greenery – you name it. There should be splashes everywhere for your eye to alight on!
 
5. All colour schemes are improved by accents: the final touches of colour that add an element of surprise, and bring rooms to life. There are no fixed rules when it comes to choosing these; just take care with the amount of colour you use and where you use it. As fab as that bright orange might look on a pillow, it may not feel quite so amazing on four walls because the impact will be so much stronger.
 
6. Create the illusion of space by blurring the boundaries between walls and ceilings. Paint them all out the same colour and suddenly you’ve made your space a zillion times bigger. Promise!
 

Be brave! To start with, decorating with colour can seem like a daunting task. Colour behaves differently accordingly to where you put it. The effect changes again once you add lighting, pattern, texture and greenery into the mix. I think this is why people favour whites over any other colour group, as they distort less when other elements are thrown into the mix. However, to me, this is a bit like decorating by numbers. Too easy! Bold hues, on the other hand, make everything on display feel grander, cooler, more intense, with beautiful undertones subtly changing in the daylight. You’ll never look back!

Find more info like this plus lots more in my book, COLOUR. 

Shop here.

 

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