Color

By now you have selected the fabrics you want to use for the living room you are doing as your main project for this course. Look at the fabrics you have selected. How will you use color in the room? How bold will you be in selecting the color for the walls and the floor? How will you know when you have achieved color harmony? Color harmony is the use of pleasing, balanced colors that work together to create a relationship of concord and agreement, giving a sense of order and visual pleasure? Will you be bold in your use of color or do you want to create a calm, subdued atmosphere? Most people have a favorite color or hue. If you use this color indiscriminately or to excess, you will tire of it or end up disliking it altogether. How do you keep your favorite color in favor? In this section you will learn how to incorporate your favorite color into a planned color scheme. You will learn to use colors to enhance a room and produce an atmosphere that is pleasing and functional.

Sometimes you will be working with other people’s favorite color or you may need to use colors that were favored in a specific historical period such as the 1930s or the mid 18th century. If your client wants to produce an interior that is ‘true’ to an historical era, you will have to familiarize yourself with the colors favored in that era to complete the task. As part of your design library, you may want to purchase The Elements of Design: A Practical Encyclopedia of the Decorative Arts from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Noel Riley. This comprehensive book with thousands of pictures gives examples of the textiles (and thus the preferred colors and designs) used throughout each historical era. For a more thorough study of color than provided here and in your text, you may want to purchase John Pile’s (the author of your text) book, Color in Interior Design.

In this section we will explore how to choose ‘colors that work’ to create order and harmony through all parts of your room. On page 292 of your text, the author writes: “Unsatisfactory color is probably the most common source of failure in interior design.” Seasoned designers know that advanced planning of color relationships is essential to...