Exterior painting work can significantly change the appearance of a house. Consequently, you'll want to think hard about the color scheme before you ask an exterior painting company to commence work. If you're preparing to think about paint color schemes, you can tackle the problem by breaking it into these four elements.
General Color Choice
There is nothing wrong with starting with a broad choice for a paint job. If you want a soft blue to be the dominant feature, use that as a starting point. You can then work your way out to a more detailed and interesting plan by adding a few layers of complexity.
Understanding Color Wheels and Complements
To an extent, most folks are familiar with color schemes, and it is usually based on the simple complementary version of the color wheel. Yes, the same color wheel from elementary school that said orange and blue work well.
However, there are other approaches to complementary colors. The near-complement method is an especially interesting one. Rather than using the color directly across from your main choice, you use one of the complementary color's neighbors.
You also can use an analogous system. In this approach, you pick the colors to either side of your preferred color. Somebody using cyan, for example, might select dark blue or green as the additional color for this kind of scheme.
Likewise, you can skip complements entirely and go monochromatic. You might use light blue as the main color and bark blue for additional features.
Fields and Accents
The field color is the dominant color. If you want the house to generally be blue, for example, that is your field color for the project.
Accent colors are the ones that highlight certain features. Shudders are common accent color features. If you were using a light cyan color scheme with dark blue accents, the shudders would be the dark blue component.
You can also use trim to separate components. Someone might use a white or light tan trim to separate a dark blue front door from a lighter blue field color. Especially if you're using a monochromatic scheme, this can prevent the colors from bleeding into each other visually.
Testing
Once you've selected a set of colors you think might work well, you should ask an exterior painting company to help you test it. They can provide swatches so you can see how the paints look next to each other. Likewise, once you narrow the swatches down to what you like, they can perform patch tests on a less-visible part of the house. Once you're happy, you can approve the project and start.
For more information, reach out to an exterior painting company, such as GT Home Services, near you.
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