Always pause and think about light before choosing colors for your interior painting job. You may fancy dark colors or be an all-white lover, but the results may disappoint. There’s a strong correlation between the indoor colors and light that immensely influences the finishing results. It has to do with your choices around the house but also the way different types of lights react when shed on different colors. Since painting the home to make it pleasant without creating glare or leaving some corners in the dark has to do with the light & color relation, let us share some valuable secrets.
Bringing the right color home
Home painting aims at much more than refreshing the walls of the house. Choosing a new color is much more than finding a new home interior style. It’s also about making a small room look bigger or a short room look taller. It’s about brightening up hidden corners and making areas, like the home office or the kitchen, easy to work in. And while our full intention is to choose colors for the wall, the ceiling, the closet, the door, and the kitchen cabinet painting, we almost always forget one main thing. To consider the effects of light. Also, to consider the relation between light – artificial and natural, in relation to the colors already at home and the color we plan to bring in. Should we take a closer look?
Natural light
Before you get started with your interior house painting, stop and think the features of the structure. The most important ones? The home’s orientation. How many windows each room has – also, the size of the openings! Additionally, the weather in your location – do you get lots of light? Hardly any natural light? Naturally, the bigger the glass openings, the more the light you get inside. But as the day grows older, the sunlight changes. In the morning, you get more sun in the bedroom; in the afternoon, you get more sunlight in the kitchen. Naturally, the more the sunlight, the more glare you get indoors. You will notice a yellowish cast that will later develop into a darker, bluish and reddish one as the day will progress.
If you have big windows in the kitchen and you are cooking when there’s still sunshine, there’ll probably be too much glare that may keep you from prepping food at one particular point if the indoor colors are reflective. In this case, white will be reflective. But do you know what? It’s not just the combination of white paints and the direct sunshine that will make the indoor environment not pleasant. So, let’s see what more affects your color choices.
Artificial light
Don’t underestimate the importance of artificial lighting when it comes to your house painting. There are three main considerations here.
1. The location of the lighting fixtures. You may want to create a cozy corner with an accent wall painted blue or black, but if there’s no lighting in this area of the house, your corner will be dull and gloomy.
2. Do you have warm or cool lights at home? Halogen and incandescent lighting choices are best for a warm environment. Fluorescent is cool. Now, what’s the problem here! While cool lights go better with cool colors (blues, greens) and warm lights match better with warm colors (orange, reds), it also depends on the size of the room. It depends on how many green or red walls are around as well.
3. Then, it has to do with whether you want to have task or ambient light at a particular part of the house. So, your decision about colors is not affected only by the type of artificial lighting (cool or warm) but also the fixture in regard to what you want to do in a certain area. You need to consider if you want a pendant shedding light to one particular spot or distribute it around the room – this has to do with its position and height too. It also has to do with the bulbs.
Wall paints
One more think to remember is that the painted wall may not have the color of the sample you chose. Why? Because colors look different – usually, darker, on bigger surfaces. And so, a blue accent wall that is supposed to be your relaxing point in the house may become too gloomy if you omit correlating the factor light and the factor paint changes, from sample to wall.
Indoor colors
And then, don’t forget that the rooms in the house are not empty. There’s furniture, upholstery, small and big items, and all have different colors. The overall color feeling you get in one room comes from the combination of all the above, the wall paint and lights included.
What to do?
Tell your painting contractor to test colors on the wall. Consider all forms of light in relation to all colors indoors and what you are trying to achieve – cook without glare, work on your computer, relax, sleep!