How Do You Pick Paint Colors?

When we first bought our condo, I can’t tell you how excited I was at the prospect of painting the walls! After years and years of renting white walled apartments, finally, FINALLY I got to paint my rooms any color I want!

Condo Blues and Lazy Budget Chef World Headquarters and Thunderdome

I skipped down to the store and basked in the glow of the rainbow of paint chips before me in the paint department. 

Then I got overwhelmed. 

It’s one thing to say that you want to paint a room green because it’s your favorite color and certainly another when 100 shades of green paint chips are staring you in the face at the store. Not to mention, coordinating the colors of the trim work, curtains, floor, ceiling, and furniture with the wall so it doesn’t look like a hodge podge of stuff I like but doesn’t go together at all.

ACK!

Design books and blogs didn’t help much because they explained the color wheel and then said, “But you can do what you like!” Well, I took classes that covered the color wheel and the psychology of color too and it’s not doing me a lick of good in trying to decide coordinating colors for the guest bathroom. There’s just too many choices!

I got the answer to my color inspiration problem at work. One day the Graphics Manager stopped me in the hall, complimented my outfit, and said I have a great grasp of color.

That is when I realized my paint color inspiration was in my closet. I was wearing it all along! Sometimes it works well, like choosing lime green for the walls in our office because I wear a lot of lime green. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out as well as I’d like. For example Husband rejected orange with hot pink accents for the kitchen because it’s “too girly” even though he likes the color combo on me just fine. 

What do you do if you don’t have a Graphics Manager to shove you in the right paint color direction?

You could take a quiz.

Yep.

A quiz.

My Colortopia  features a short personality and preference quiz that gives you color ideas based on answering such questions as where you like to vacation, the type of music you like to listen to, and your personality traits. You can give it a test run on the My Colortopia widget I embedded in this post. Go on, click it! It won’t bite you. I promise.

Based on my answers, My Colortopia gave me the following color suggestions of Glidden (an Ohio based company – yay!) paint.

Move your curser over the paint chip to see the name. Give it a click and My Colortopia shows you a coordinating color palette. If Husband still wants an orange room, I think this color palette might get his approval over my first suggestion.

For further design and color inspiration, My Colortopia features articles from some of my favorite home and DIY bloggers: Ana White of Ana-White.com, Diane Henkler, of In My Own Style,  Nicole Balch of Making it Lovely Linday Ballard of Living with Lindsay,  Melissa Michaels of The Inspired Room,   Kate Riley of Centsational Girl and  Stefanie Schiada of Brooklyn Limestone.

How do you decide on paint colors? What inspires you?

Disclosure: I have partnered with Glidden/Akzo Nobel Paints to write this post but the thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

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