bedroom wall colors can have an effect on your mood.
Bedrooms are sanctuaries as well as sleeping places, and the color scheme of your bedroom can have an impact on how much time you enjoy spending in your room. Choosing bedroom wall colors can be most successful when you know a bit about color theory and the impact colors have on your emotions as well as your eyes. There’s more to painting a room than you thought.
Color Theory
Color theory divides the color spectrum generally into three sections. White, black and gray are set aside as neutrals. Colors within the red, orange, yellow range are regarded as warm, making spaces seem cozier or more intimate; blues, greens and violets are classified as cool bedroom wall colors, making spaces appear to expand or enlarge. In general, the more intense the color shade, the stronger the visual impact.
Color Response
At the same time, according to decorating authorities, colors impact strongly in other ways on how we perceive and react to space. Pale shades of a color make space seem larger and airier, while intense or dark shades make spaces seem smaller and more closed in. Shades of red and yellow stimulate feelings of energy and excitement but also sometimes of anger, agitation or irritability. Colors in the green-blue-violet range often produce greater feelings of calm but can also make spaces seem dreary. Factoring in both visual effect and emotional impact suggests that bedroom wall colors may be most restful when they are both soothingly pale and only mildly warm or cool.
Other Factors to Consider when Choosing Bedroom Wall Colors
As Benjamin Moore’s “Color Language” points out, visual and emotional responses to color are the result of the relationship between color and light. A color chosen in a brightly-lit, large-windowed paint store will look different in the grayish light of a heavily-shaded, Northern-exposure bedroom. Not only should you try out paint samples in the rooms where they will be used, but also you should examine the samples on bright and cloudy days, in natural and artificial light, in daylight and after dark. The look of color in artificial light is particularly important for bedrooms. What looks like heavenly blue in one exposure becomes glacial in another. Selecting a lavender or soft gray with pink tones may make a bedroom more welcoming than a blueish tone.
Other Issues for Bedroom Wall Colors
In many houses, the proportions and location of bedrooms keeps them stubbornly dark, and pale colors merely make the space look washed out. While light colors often enlarge spaces, some decorators point to the use of medium shades of color for better brightening and definition of space. Combining a medium-toned fern green with creamy woodwork, for example, lets paint bring warmth into vaguely defined space. Highlighting woodwork, an accent wall or other architectural feature of an undistinguished room with medium-to-strong color can interact effectively with neutrals to produce a stronger sense of light.
In addition to paint chips and catalogs, online paint-selection tools can help you think creatively about bedroom and other paint color choices.