Finding the right shade of paint for a room can be a time-consuming process. It might start out as a simple enough chore - you go to the paint store, and you find something that you like. Before long, however, you find that you've chosen the wrong shade, and that you need to return it. To make sure that this doesn't happen to you, you need a way to help simplify the paint buying process.
Know what kind of mood you want
When you need to decide what color your paint should be, the first thing to do is to think about the feeling or mood that you believe the room should have. If you want it to feel bright and energetic, for instance, you wouldn't go with browns or grays; you would instead go with reds, yellows and purples. Mixing grays and reds would create energy, together with a gentler mood. Determining what you want your room to feel like can be a great way to find out what color to pick.
Think about the decor
When you decide on the right color for a room, it's important to think not of the bare room, but of the finished room -- the furniture, shelving, carpets, and paintings on the walls and so on. The paint on the walls could go with all of these things.
Think of the lighting
Whether you have fluorescent strip lighting, colored mood lighting or LEDs, room lighting can change the way your paint colors look. It's easy to test how paint looks in different kinds of light, however. All you need to do is to go to a paint store that has a lightbox. Lightboxes can put paint chips in different kinds of light, and help you find out how it affects the colors.
Do a paint test
No matter what kind of lightbox you may have access to in order to test your colors; it can never be as good as the real thing. The best way to test a paint shade is to actually put it on the wall to see how it looks. You don't need to paint a large area of wall --just a patch about three or four feet on each side is all you need to help your imagination. If you're not happy painting patches of different colors on your wall, you can get canvases of the kind that painters use. You can paint them different shades, and put them up on the wall to see what the colors are like.
Think of what the other rooms are like
When you paint any room, it's a good idea to keep in mind the color theme for your entire store. This means that you wouldn't want to change your decor or color scheme drastically going from one room to the next. A radical change of color isn't just a problem when you go from one room to the next. Often, the interior walls of one room are visible from the next room. A major change could be jarring, which could subconsciously frustrate your customer resulting in them walking out without purchasing. When you consider different paint shades, it's important to think of the store as a whole.
Finally, if you want a paint shade that goes with your room, you could think of getting your own custom paint color. All you need to do is to take a picture of the chairs, shelving, or other pieces of furniture to the paint store. They would help you create a shade just like the color on your sample. You can be sure of a great match with your decor then.
