Some people do not want to use color in their living spaces for fear of getting it wrong. It is a scary proposition but it is also quite simple and gets down to a few basics. Let us look at some tips to play with colors in your living spaces and get it right!

1.    Use the 60-30-10 rule

If you look at some top magazine interior designs or the inside of nay house that you like you will realize the rule applies to most if not all of them. The 60% hue is supposed to unify the coloration, the 30 percent is for providing visual interest, and the 10 percent offers some sparkle. No one knows why this systems works except that it works. Therefore, to get the colors right in a living space, allocate 60 percent for the dominant color, 30 percent for the secondary color and the remaining 10 percent for the accent color.

2.    Choose a color scheme

It is not easy to come up with a color scheme for a home or even just a room. You can use a color wheel to reduce your choices to two color schemes. This will provide you with a starting point. On the color wheel, you will also find complementary colors across from each other for example red and green, purple and orange. If you want a more formal or visually challenging room, then you can use complementary colors to paint it. These should be used in areas like the living and dining rooms.

On the color wheel, next to each other, you will also find analogous colors for example blue and violet. Use this for a more casual and restful feel in a room. You can use analogous colors in less formal parts of the house like the bedrooms, dens, and family rooms.

3.    Remember to use black

Black is quite a simple color with unique qualities. You can add it to any room with any colors and it will bring out the other colors even more. You should add a black element like a picture frame, lampshade, TV stand or any other black element that fits in the room. This will enhance all the other colors in the room.

4.    Follow nature’s lead

Some people make mistakes not necessarily with colors but with value. Value is described as the relative lightness or darkness of a given room. You will often find some rooms that have no balance in regards to value. Some rooms will have one side of them very light and the other very dark. When designing your room, try mimicking the outside world that is nature. For the floor, you should use dark colors to mimic the ground, for the walls, use medium values of colors to mimic the trees and mountains and finally for the ceiling, use brighter values of colors to mimic the sky. If you use this value system, your interior design will come out right all the time.

5.    Pull from the pattern

If you need help choosing a color scheme, go over the house and look at the largest pattern in that particular room. It could be anything, perhaps an oriental area rug, drapery, upholstery or even a huge piece of art. Then pick your colors according to that object. Unless you are starting your house from scratch, in which case you will not need this tip, this is much more cheaper than picking colors randomly for the wall only to later realize that there is nothing in the room or anywhere else will match your walls. Therefore, if the dominant color in the pattern you used is orange, then use the 60-30-10 rule with orange as 60 percent and follow the order for the other colors.

6.    Flow the colors

You should flow colors in all the rooms from one room to the next. In order to do this, all you need to do is pick a color in one room and then restate it in the other room in a different form. For instance, if your sofa is orange, use the same color for the seat fabric in another room like the dining area. You can continue with the pattern into the other rooms as well. You can even use this design within the same room, for example if your sofa is, say, cream, you can benefit from a cream color in your living room area rug.

7.    Think about contrast

Try to mix colors of different values in the same room. A high contrast room seems clearer and more defined than a room that only has low value colors. Depending on the space and the feel you want to create for your home renovation in Calgary, you can use black and white, for instance, to create a formal feel or white and beige to create a more calming feel.