I suspect part of your confusion might be evaluating the color boards against your current new drywall. Give it a coat of primer (which you'll have to do anyway), and look at your color preferences once again. Do this in both daytime and with artificial lighting. Are you planning baseboards? White? This will separate your wall and floor colors - most any color wall paint should work with your tile color.

I believe in a colorful basement. How you intend to use the space is key. The secret to making a finished basement work is the lighting. A variety of artificial options (cans, sconses, pendants and table) is helpful and dimmers enable a mood to be adjusted.

We selected an off-white as the basic color (wall and ceiling) for our basement, then used colorful posters on those walls. Different accent wall colors define individual areas within a great room concept.

Our basement is primarily used for entertaining. You might need to go to the second page of the link to see the various wall colors. Hope this helps. Good luck.

Here is a link that might be useful: Basement

Thanks for replying, fmroberts. I love your basement and how well you have used paint colors to demarcate different areas.
I will have to think some more about using accent walls. I was hoping to get away with bringing in color with artwork and furnishings.
I agree the purple wallboard is throwing off the samples. I am not sure how much time we will have between primer and paint. Maybe i can hang larger pieces of posterboard behind and look at the colors again.
Any suggestions on colors? Anyone else?
Thanks,
Vinaya

We are redoing our basement shortly - we are going with cork floors that will be a warm color not unlike your tile. We're painting the walls a SW color - "honied white" - it is a warm white and I have used it in other parts of my house and am always happy with it. I love the idea of accent walls In a basement and may do that later once the painters have gone home :)

Thanks, laurainlincoln. I will look at that color. For some reason, our contractor wants to only use BM colors-so I haven't been looking at other brands.
Good Luck with your basement. I love cork floors but can't use them here.

We just painted our basement SW Cherish Cream and love it; it's a tan/beige that is warm and changes color beautifully in the light, we think. Almost a touch of subtle peach in it sometimes and sometimes it has a bit of a yellow undertone.

vinudev_liny
Your contractor probably uses BM paint regularly, knowing it's application techniques to assure a good result.

And, he probably gets a contractor discount of up to 20% which increases his margin while reselling to you for retail. Most major paint brands have such a program.

But, a good contractor will work with you in selecting your final color. Have them prime a wall and allow you time to finalize your color choice. (This is why I DIY whatever I can, my schedule, no one elses!) All will work out.

Thanks for the paint suggestion, susanka. SW Cherish Cream looks similar to the BM Navajo White we have in our bedroom. In our lighting, it takes on a definite pink tone-something I want to avoid in the basement.

fmroberts, The painters are going to be priming part of the space today-and are going to try our top two choices -Edgecomb Gray and Camouflage. Hoping either of them will work out. There are just so many colors out there I want to try but have to limit myself somewhere.

Thanks once again.

Hi, vinudev. Please post pix of your finished product! Actually, we've had Navajo White and the Cherish Cream doesn't come out similarly at all on our walls. I'm glad you've winnowed it down to two choices -- we had about 10 samples up, each several feet in area, and it took us weeks to stew around and finally decide.