Warm - Cool colors
By painting a room we make the room light warm or cold. The warmer color in a room makes it seem more convenient, more comfortable. But what is a warm color and what is a cold color? red and yellow, orange, ocher and brown are warm, blues, greens and grays are cold.
It is not always true that rooms with red and yellow appear warm, while rooms with blue, green and gray appear cold. We must pay attention to the light that the space has. we will be able to paint all the walls white first hand, so we can feel how much and what light the space has.
If the light is warm, then the white surface will tend to have shades of red-yellow.
If the light is cold the surface tends slightly towards blue-green.
So we could choose the colors that together with the natural light will create a warm lighting in the room.
If we want an orange, an ocher, to maintain the feeling of warm lighting, they must be alone, or adjacent to an indigo.
Then their relationship becomes constructive, but not colorful.
Every color, therefore, has its opposite:
- White has the opposite of black
- Yellow has the opposite of violet
Orange (ochre) is opposite blue (indigo
Red has the opposite of green
Color combinations
This relationship of contrast, we can use it to emphasize some differences in the construction and configuration of a space.
For example: we could paint the ceiling of a room with a dark indigo and the walls with a yellow ocher in order to express and emphasize the difference of the vertical surface from the horizontal. With these differences a ceiling seems to be lowered.
We must note that in Greek architecture the houses were colored with the colors that come from the earth, that's why we also call earthy black (ash), red (red or brick), yellow ocher and white. Along with these they also used indigo.
Combinations of these basic colors can give us a variety of other derived colors e.g.
- the menexedenes come from a combination: black + white + deep red (tile)
- the oranges: ocher + crimson, the greens - olives: from black + white + tile + ocher.
We can still use these commercially available powder colors today. With synthetic material plastic or oil, we can make plastic paints or oil paints ourselves, if we do not want to refer to ready-made paints on the market every time. Perhaps these earthy colors help our houses to stand out better in the landscape where the colors came from.
You can create a VIRTUAL visualization of your space with the colors of your choice, using programs that have various paint companies, such as Benjamin Moore and Dulux.