Getting the most out of colour

This colour scheme has the same strong visual contrast as the complementary colour scheme, but has less tension.

Triad — This scheme uses colours that are evenly spaced around the colour wheel. They tend to be quite vibrant even if you use pale or unsaturated versions of your hues.

To use a triadic harmony successfully, the colours should be carefully balanced; let one colour dominate and use the other two as accents.

Tetrad — This scheme uses two base colours that are one colour apart on the colour wheel and include their complements, such as red, green, yellow, and purple.

The tetrad colour scheme works best if you let one colour be dominant and ensure a balance between the warm and cool colours in your design.

Warm and cool colour schemes — Warm colour schemes are centred around red hues, make up one half of the colour wheel, and do not include blue at all.

Cool colour schemes, on the other hand, are centred around blue hues, they make up the other half of the colour wheel and do not include red at all.

Most of these schemes can further be explored by adding white or black in the same degree to all the colours.

Working colour into your space

Painting small rooms cool colours to give the illusion of space, and vice-versa for larger rooms, is not the rule of thumb.

Go against the grain where you see fit by making a small room’s architecture intimate with a rich, warm colour scheme and let your big rooms expand with light.

Even with nine colour schemes to work with, make sure that in the end, the colours you pick speak about your personal style; no point in people wowing over something that looks good but you really do not like it.

If you are unsure about how much colour to put where, go with the 60-30-10 rule; divide the colours in the space into components of 60 per cent of a dominant colour, 30 per cent of a secondary colour, and 10 per cent of an accent colour.

The result will be a balanced room. Accentuate architectural details by painting them a lighter variation of the dominant colour in the room.

If the dominant colour is white, then go dark; do not allow beautiful features to blend into the background.