Using Brilliant Colour in the home

Today, paint in particular of all decorating materials is relatively cheap, widely available and easy to change. If you make a mistake, so what - you can put it right. Do some looking and planning and you probably won't make the mistake in the first place. It's worth taking the risk to reap the benefits.

Then there is the feature that brilliant colour is somehow too much to live with, too overwhelming. The answer to this is that you don't have to decorate your entire home or even a whole room with bright colour, though once you have started you may find this is exactly what you want to do. If you are feeling tentative, start with a small room, freshen it up with a background of white or a pale shade of a clean colour and introduce touches of bright colour in cushions, pictures or posters, a vase, a tablecloth or a sofa throw. Or you can paint just part of a room - one wall, for example.

Another worry is that bright colour will be too dark. This usually arises from a misunderstanding about the difference between 'bright' and 'strong' colour, and confusion about the terminology in general. This series of articles explains the jargon which is interesting but not actually necessary to the home decorator.

Learning to love saturated hues

The main concept to grasp is that 'bright' colour means the pure pink or blue or whatever, with no black or white added. Bright colours can be strong, but they are fresh. They do not include shades like bottle green and burgundy red which are, indeed, dark - dark because they either have black mixed into the pure, bright colour, or they have been muddied by the mixture of pigments. Another point to remember is that the darkness or lightness of a room depends as much upon available natural light and how you use artificial lighting as on the brightness of the colour in which it is decorated.

Bright colour is not a fad

'Bright colour doesn't go with things' is something we often hear, and in a way this is a good point. It depends, though, on what colour the 'things' are. Any colour you use to decorate a room has to be compatible with the others, otherwise there will be a sense of unease, a visual jarring. Any colour has a group of other colours with which it looks good - place an earthy terracotta alongside a modern shocking pink and you could, indeed be dissatisfied. As a general rule, bright colours go well with other bright colours, with white (which shows off their brilliance), with neutrals and grey (which subdue them somewhat), with some dark colours such as navy blue and deep scarlet (so long as the colour balance is right) and with pale shades produced by diluting the bright colours with white.

  source: excerpt from brilliant colour at home by elizabeth hilliard