Video: Creating a Color Scheme

SAN FRANCISCO — Host, Sarah Rutan: One of the most important aspects of painting your home is choosing a color scheme you’ll enjoy looking at for many years. Today we’re in San Francisco with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Yefim Skomorovsky to learn how this is done.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Yefim Skomorovsky: As a painting contractor I deal with a lot of people who have difficulty deciding what color they’re going to use. And that’s understandable. It’s a decision they’re going to have to live with a long time. Well, I start building a color scheme from a main color. And by that I mean the color of the body of the house, or main walls. Okay, now the color you like, would you like for your main color? I don’t know. You’re going to have to answer that question.

One good way of doing that is looking inside of your closet. See what colors you like, and what colors you see there. Now, I happen to like green. So, here’s a green palette. Now, a good way to build a color scheme, is to do a – Use what we know in the industry as a ‘monochromatic color scheme’. ‘Mono’ stands for single, or one. So, let me just say that we’re going to use this color as the main color, as the body of our house. Well, a good way to create a pleasing combination would be to, say, use a color here for the trim of your house.

But if you want to spice things up, for example, we can introduce, and often do, introduce what’s known as a complementary color. And how do you find a complementary color? Well, we use a color wheel. Here’s a color wheel that has all the main colors here. And let’s just say, let’s find the color of green. Here it is. Here’s our green, and the direct opposite of it would be right here. And that’s color red. Okay. So let’s go back to our color building tool. And let’s introduce like, let’s just say, this red. Here’s a red. Perhaps you want to paint this the color of your front door, or maybe your window sashes. Do not go overboard. Use it sparingly. Good luck to you!

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local top rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.