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Dare to Choose a More Colorful Neutral
Understanding Shades of Hue Helps You Go Beyond Gray, White and Beige
When a lot people hear the word neutral, they think immediately of brown and beige color schemes. While it's true that browns and beiges can be a good place to start, there's a lot more to neutrals.
Before we get to that though, it'll help to define some terms. Individual colors are described as having hue, value, chroma, shade, tone and tint. Put simply, hue is artist-speak for the actual color. Value is a description of how light or dark a color is. Chroma is how bright a color is. Shade describes the addition of black, tone describes the addition of gray and tint describes the addition of white.
Black, gray and white are true neutrals. Brown, tan and their derivatives are called near-neutrals. Adding darker pigments to a primary color like blue or a secondary color like green is another way to add the feel of a color without adding the weight of a color.
Before we get to that though, it'll help to define some terms. Individual colors are described as having hue, value, chroma, shade, tone and tint. Put simply, hue is artist-speak for the actual color. Value is a description of how light or dark a color is. Chroma is how bright a color is. Shade describes the addition of black, tone describes the addition of gray and tint describes the addition of white.
Black, gray and white are true neutrals. Brown, tan and their derivatives are called near-neutrals. Adding darker pigments to a primary color like blue or a secondary color like green is another way to add the feel of a color without adding the weight of a color.
| The accent wall in this bedroom is a near-neutral blue. When I mentioned that a near-neutral can add the feel of a color without bringing along the weight of a color, this is what I was talking about.
Blue can be a heavy color and large expanses of it on a wall make a blue room. But by choosing a near-neutral blue, this bedroom's color scheme isn't dictated by the wall color. |
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| This bath is making great use of a near-neutral blue as well. The paint color the designer used here is allowing all of the elements in this bath to blend together harmoniously. Using a blue in its more primary hue wouldn't work here at all but shade, tone and tint of this blue is a success. |
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by Global Living
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| Interior design is all about intention and sometimes the intention is to complement rather than contrast. Here's a near-neutral green complementing dark stained wood. Near-neutrals allow anybody to have a whole room make a statement rather than a particular element in a room. |
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Red is a powerful color, and using it effectively can be a challenge. True red is an automatic attention-grabber and that's great when you want to make a bold statement or draw attention to a specific feature of a room.
The near-neutral red door here is calling attention to itself, but it's not shouting.
The near-neutral red door here is calling attention to itself, but it's not shouting.
by Amoroso Design
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Purple is another color that can be tricky to use in a room. Much like its blue parent, purple tends to dictate the color scheme of a room where it's being used.
Adding black to purple turns it into a near-neutral purple and turns down the volume enough so that it can coordinate with other elements in a room.
Adding black to purple turns it into a near-neutral purple and turns down the volume enough so that it can coordinate with other elements in a room.
More than any other color, it seems orange comes in and out of fashion on the shortest cycle. The orange that comes and goes however is orange in its brightest form. The orange that endures is this one, terra cotta. Terra cotta is one of the near-neutral derivatives of orange, and using it in a room can be on trend and classical at the same time.
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As I mentioned at the start of this ideabook, black, white and gray are true neutrals. Combining black and white in a checkerboard is about as strong a pattern as it's possible to have. Using a near-neutral red on the sofa allows for the introduction of red (which always looks terrific with black and white) without detracting from the bold floor. The designer picked a red with enough black in it to tone it down while keeping enough yellow in it to keep it red.
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There's a near-neutral purple, a near-neutral green and a near-neutral yellow in this vignette and the amount of black in these colors is what's preventing this scene from looking like an Easter parade.
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Of all the tricky colors out there, there's none so tricky as pink. While there's never any doubt that you're standing in a pink room, selecting a near-neutral pink can make accessorizing and furnishing a pink room an easier task.
Near-neutrals can make the color phobic a little more comfortable with color and they're a great way for anybody to add complementary color to a home.
So now that I've run through some examples of near-neutral colors, are you ready to paint your house in sage greens and dusty blues?
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Near-neutrals can make the color phobic a little more comfortable with color and they're a great way for anybody to add complementary color to a home.
So now that I've run through some examples of near-neutral colors, are you ready to paint your house in sage greens and dusty blues?
Next: Browse more home design photos
Ideabook updated on Feb. 24, 2011.
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Thanks, Paul!
i feel smarter paul. thank you.
If you're going to do more on color theory, I have a conundrum I can't find any answer to. From time to time I've read just a bare sentence about color connected to the 'heat' or 'coolness' of the light coming into a room.
I'm looking at a house that is sort of plus-sign-shaped (+). It means that each 'wing' has windows facing in three directions. For example, the office has a full northern, an eastern and a southern exposure. The living room is eastern, southern and western. The kitchen is southern, western and northern. The dining room gets a scrap of eastern sun in the morning, but has a western window (small) that gets no direct sunlight and a northern window that also gets no direct sunlight. This arrangement is echoed upstairs in the bedrooms.
The living room will have sunlight almost all day, especially in summer. The office only in the mornings. The kitchen in the afternoons. The dining room has daylight but not sunlight, except early in the morning at high summer (and a low eave makes me wonder how much even then), and certainly no sunlight at the dinner hour.
How would I choose colors based on the fact that some of the rooms are 'warmer' because of more sunlight and some of the rooms are 'cooler' because of less sunlight? I love the feeling a warm, yellowish, sun-filled living room, but wonder if going in those warm shades for paint would make the room simply feel boiling in summer.
It would be great if you could do an idea book about choosing color based on the fall of light in the room. How does it work? How do we decide about paint colors when taking into consideration the amount of sunlight a room gets?