Room painting ideas

Here you'll find room painting ideas for all your living spaces: big or small, light or dark, for eating, sleeping, studying or bathing. Every room can have its own colors and design.

What room will you paint?

Here you'll find room painting ideas for your:

On all of these pages you'll find links to pages with color schemes, and the necessary DIY painting tips.

Room painting ideas for different situations:

Is your room big, or small? Big rooms can do with darker walls and contrasting colors, and small rooms are better kept in lighter and shaded colors. Check here for more on big and small rooms.
Before choosing paint colors, better first decide on the flooring and furniture. It's easier to match your paint colors to them, then the other way around.
House paint software can be a great help in making an interior painting design - you'll see your own home pictures in new paint colors, adjusted to your own lighting situation. Use it for making color schemes, or to check how a ready-made color scheme will be looking in your own room.
It's good to read something about how colors effect your mood.
Make sure you get the right kind of paint, and do your preparations - then your paintcoats will last.
Your paint's sheen influences the styling effect, and the look of your paint colors

Colors or offwhites? Room painting ideas on color

Offwhite trim and white walls are the safest choice, if you want to sell your house. But if you want more in life: take some time so find out about interior paint colors.

The hue is of course important to decide on, but the light- or darkness of that hue is just as important for your styling, especially when you put them on the walls. When you make a color scheme based on existing elements in your room - a painting, fabric or rug - you'll have a good chance on creating a warm, lively and harmonious room.

Making color schemes can be done in two ways: with house paint software. or with the help of the Paint Color Cheat Sheets. Take the software if you like working at the computer, and the cheat sheets when you value the experience and knowledge or a professional color consultant. The paint color cheat sheets were developed by Yelena Kublitzky, a color consultant who condensed long years of experience (in working with a painting contractor) into an easy-to-use guide to choosing interior paint colors (click here for a review).

Fool-proof guide to making color schemes

Room styling tips

When thinking up room painting ideas, don't just think about the paint. Painting is just one of the styling elements. Every visual element in the room is part of an arrangement, a bouquet, and this bouquet makes the overall room impression. It can be focused on color (shaded colors, contrasting colors, or one strong color with black and white/offwhite). But it can also be focused on textures and textiles - refined fabrics, stoney walls, wooden furniture. When elements like this are important in your room decor, choose paint colors that form a supporting decor for these elements.

If you'd like your wood colors to come out bright and shining, think of surrounding them with contrasting colors: blues, greens and violets. click here for more on contrast. Some more general styling 'rules':

Try to make sure your room has tonal range: light and dark elements. The contrast makes it interesting.
Include floor and furniture colors in your color scheme
In general: let the ceiling be lighter than the walls, and the walls lighter than the floor.
Find out what your styling theme is, or invent a new style. As long as you put things together for a reason, they will look good. The artistic reason will show. And yes - lazy and economy reasons will show themselves too...

Knowing this rules is one thing, but to follow them blindly won't help. You need to play with them, and break them if you have to. As in the gentle eastern saying: Learn the rules, so you'll know how to break them properly.

Room painting ideas for faux painting

Faux painting techniques are a good way to make your walls more lively. There are all kinds of techniques, like faux finishing, marbling and color washing. These techniques may look advanced or difficult, but there are a few simple tricks that make a big difference:

The look of a wall depends on its edges. If the wall surface is neatly outlined (with masking tape), and evenly filled, anything you do will look like a modern painting style.
When you make gestures: repeat the same gestures all over the wall, and things will look like they were just meant to be.
In faux finishing, you use the effect of underlying paint colors - click here for more on that.
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