Confident Color: When to Use Cool and Warm Hues
Change the Mood of a Room With Colors that Advance or Recede
Knowing the difference between a warm color and a cool color can help you choose color combinations more confidently. When you understand how the temperature of a color affects how it's perceived, you can use that knowledge to design color schemes that work for you.
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| When you're confronted with a blank space and it's time decide a color scheme, how can you know how to make color work with you instead of against you to accomplish your design goals? How can you know what color goes where?
The answer to those questions is in the color wheel. |
by Paul Anater
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I talked before about how to use the color wheel to devise some basic color schemes. It also can help you determine the temperature of a color.
The basic color wheel is split into two halves, a warm half and a cool half. The warm half runs from red through yellow-green. The cool half runs from green through red-violet.
This is not an arbitrary division. Our eyes and brains perceive different wavelengths of light as colors. Red wavelengths come from higher temperatures than blue wavelengths. That's important if you're studying physics, but how that applies to interior design is that warm colors tend to advance and cool colors tend to recede.
The basic color wheel is split into two halves, a warm half and a cool half. The warm half runs from red through yellow-green. The cool half runs from green through red-violet.
This is not an arbitrary division. Our eyes and brains perceive different wavelengths of light as colors. Red wavelengths come from higher temperatures than blue wavelengths. That's important if you're studying physics, but how that applies to interior design is that warm colors tend to advance and cool colors tend to recede.
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| Since warm colors tend to advance, this means that they tend to draw in a space. This red living room feels more intimate because it's red. If the designer wanted to make the room feel more open and expansive, she would have chosen a cooler color. |
Orange, as a warm color, can do the same thing red's doing in the photo above. You can use warmer colors to draw in a room and make it feel smaller.
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| If you have a large, sparsely furnished room and your goal is to close it in and make it feel more intimate, a warm color like this yellow can do that for you. |
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| This tendency of warm colors to advance can be seen at work in this yellow-green accent wall. That accent wall is pulling the stairs closer to the dining table. Of course, it's not actually moving anything, but the perception is that the space feels closer.
If you're deciding on a paint scheme and there are elements in a room that you want to draw closer, point them in a warmer color. |
Green is the first cool color of the color wheel. In green, the tendency for colors to advance stops and they begin to recede. By recede I mean that cool colors expand a room or a space.
This bathroom feels more expansive with a green wall than it would with an equally saturated red.
This bathroom feels more expansive with a green wall than it would with an equally saturated red.
A blue wall tends to make a room feel larger. This is important to know if you have a small room that you want to expand rather than make more intimate and close.
You can mix and match warm and cool colors with purpose and meaning to advance your design goals and make a room more interesting. The blue walls and draperies in this living room are expanding away from the viewer and the yellow accents are advancing toward the viewer.
The warm colors in the painting on the mantle in this purple room is the clear focal point. By choosing the cool colors of the walls and furnishings, the designer is adding emphasis to the painting and she's using her knowledge of color theory to advance her goal.
The effect is subtle but impossible to miss.
The effect is subtle but impossible to miss.
The closer to red cool colors get on the wheel, the warmer they become. The last stop on the cool side of the wheel is violet-red. After violet-red, colors start to advance again.
Color theory provides a general framework to describe the behaviors of colors, and exceptions to these generalizations abound. Still, the tendencies of warm colors to advance and cool colors to recede are almost always true.
If you have a room with a low ceiling and you want the room to feel taller, paint the ceiling a white that's been tinted with blue. Similarly, if you have a very wide room that you want to feel closer and more intimate, then paint the room in a warm color and it will do just that.
How would you use warm and cool colors in your own home?
More: Choosing Hues: Roll with the Color Wheel
Color theory provides a general framework to describe the behaviors of colors, and exceptions to these generalizations abound. Still, the tendencies of warm colors to advance and cool colors to recede are almost always true.
If you have a room with a low ceiling and you want the room to feel taller, paint the ceiling a white that's been tinted with blue. Similarly, if you have a very wide room that you want to feel closer and more intimate, then paint the room in a warm color and it will do just that.
How would you use warm and cool colors in your own home?
More: Choosing Hues: Roll with the Color Wheel
Ideabook published on March 3, 2011.
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Is there such a thing as a warm blue? In the picture with the green wall and staircase, would it be offensive to the eye if the surrounding wall colours were cool? What I mean is can I have a warm accent wall and have the remaining walls a cool colour?
Thanks for the great post!
Side note: I have studied colors in art classes, as well as the psychology of colors, being a psych major, and have been DIY'ing for over a decade, however I am not a professional designer.
Now I have another way of seeing the whole matter!
Can you do something on how to choose paint for rooms based on the light in the room? I mean if a room is very sunny, for example, will warm colors make it too 'hot' feeling? If a room has a northern exposure and you paint it a warm color, would that 'feel' wrong? Or if it has a northern exposure and you paint it a cool color, will it come across as 'chilly'?
Or maybe the effect of the sunlight - strong, weak, southern, northern - makes no difference? Is it all about room size?
Thank you for such a clearly informative lesson on color.....May I ask you to expand on painting ceilings. If I want to paint a ceiling something other then white, should I paint it the same color of the walls or a shade lighter or darker? What effects would that have on a room?
I was going to use a warm color -because of the north window- but now am rethinking. What would you do?
This explains a lot. I have a red home office. It looks very nice but after I'm in it for a while it closes in on me. Recently I moved my laptop to the kitchen table because it just felt better. Now I realize that space feels very open and light - the colors are neutral. I'm going to repaint my office a cool color - maybe a green. Thanks for helping me understand. Looking good doesn't always convert to comfort.
thank you.
I'm thinking about painting some of our ceilings with "color". Could you comment on painting the ceiling a color besides the traditional white. Should I paint the ceiling the same as the walls, lighter or darker. What kind of effect would that have?
When I first got out of college I worked for a designer who was very well respected in the area where we lived. She insisted that you should never paint a room green because of the effect it had on skin tones and tended to make people look sick. Now, I believe that is a lot of poppycock... I think it really depends on the shade, the size of the room, the orientation and time of day of the sunlight and the amount of sunlight coming in. Though different colors have different effects depending on the geographic location, and the Pacific Northwest where I went to college has a lot of gloomy days. Yet, after all these years, I aways second guess myself when that choice comes up. I like to think that I will choose colors over how they make me feel over how they make me look.