Sunny Weekend - Yellow

Yellow can be hard sometimes. It can easily be too bold if not balanced properly. But yellow can be such a cheery color. It's hard to be depressed in a yellow room. Yellow runs the gamut from mellow and barely there to BOLD and beautiful. It is easy to over-do or under-do it on yellow because the tonal values can be hard to judge.

My old front room was yellow and my old kitchen was yellow too - even now some of my walls are a yellow color by Dunn Edwards called "Madera" - it veers into the more spicy yellow area, but not extremely so. You have to be patient when picking a yellow. A friend of mine tried Madera in her house and she hated the way it looked - even though she liked it in my house. Another friend of mine had a butter yellow I loved, but when I tried it in my house it didn't look creamy and buttery like it did in her house, in mine it looked barely off beige.

My usual way for picking colors is to get a TON of paint swatches and tape them to the wall in the room I am painting. I look at them every hour or so during the day as the light changes, then at night with all the lights on and then with most of the lights off - it's amazing how different the color is depending on the light - but I've decided of all the colors, this is most true of yellow - perhaps because light itself often has a yellow or warm tone to it.

As you look at your paint chips you will quickly start eliminating - I pull the ones off the wall that are no longer in the running at all until I am left with the last 4 or 5 - at that point I'll start asking other people's opinions.

I get the final say though!

The other thing about yellow is that it's such a great color to add as accent color in almost any other color scheme - red, orange, green, blue, pink, white, black, grey - even beige (though I sort of loathe beige on principle) look awesome with pops of yellow!

It can also be a great color to add to a ceiling - the ceilings in the majority of my house are yellow. In fact, I would almost never paint a ceiling white - it's not doing your room any favors. Unless you want a white on white on white room - consider a color for your ceiling - even if you have a neutral color palette otherwise. Maybe I'll do a post on colored ceilings later - they really can make a room so much better.

Bold yellow will make your eyes tired so if you go bold you need white or beige or black (or all three) accents to give it some rest. But if done right, it looks amazing.

Anyway here are some great yellows: