I did a post awhile back on colours to use in a room with red accents, for my Australian bloggy friend Kerry from A Tranquil Townhouse. Soon after, Sarah, at All Our Fingers in the Pie, emailed me from Saskatchewan and asked for some ideas of what colour to paint her new living room to go with a seafoam sofa and brown chairs. She sent me a photo of her living room in her previous house and, between you and me, I thought it looked great. Why change?
Well we all know the drill - new house, need to change things up, tired of the old paint colour etc etc. So I volunteered to put my Google fingers to work and find her some inspiration.
I did run into a couple of problems though. First, most of the rooms I found had the seafoam colour on the walls, not on the sofa. Soooo that means you'll have to use your imagination and sometimes picture the wall colour as the sofa and vice versa. It's a little complex, but I think we can do it. The other problem was that when I googled seafoam there was quite a range of colours from a seafoam that was similar to Sarah's sofa, to a light aqua, to a light turquoise, to a light blue. So again I implore you to use your imagination and picture the seafoam of Sarah's sofa in all the photos.
I had my post written with colours grouped around complimentary colours (opposite on the colour wheel), analogous colours (adjacent colours on the colour wheel), monochromatic (different values of the same colour), and neutral colours (both light and dark), when I thought I'd better check Maria's blog, Colour me Happy, to see if she would agree. Well I got reading this post and actually laughed when I realized how I had fallen into the amateur trap. So I got to work and thought about the colours again, and came up with a new way to organize them - based on colours that provide high contrast with seafoam and colours that provide low contrast. See what you think.
(I must confess I've been a bad blogger and I no longer remember where I got most of these photos from, so if you know, then please let me know and then we can all know).
HIGH CONTRAST COLOURS (yellow, gold, orange, pink, red, purple) - these colours add a real pop of colour because of their contrast to seafoam. I'm thinking this is because they are further away from seafoam on the colour wheel (see I really am an amateur, I can't help referring to the colour wheel). In my mind Sarah's sofa has a grey undertone so she needs to find a more muted version of the high contrast colours. These colours could work as a wall colour, but since they are so intense, would more likely be used as accent colours or as part of a patterned material.
from Marie Claire Maison via Down and Out Chic
HIGH CONTRAST NEUTRALS (dark gray, dark brown, black). This could be a bit intense if all the walls were painted such a dark colour, but it could look stunning on an accent wall behind the seafoam sofa.
from Decorpad
LOW CONTRAST COLOURS (green, blue, teal) - This provides a softer look than the high contrast colours, because the colours are closer to seafoam on the colours wheel (see there I go again).
David Hicks from Studio Wellspring
Using different values of seafoam will provide the calmest look of all, as it is just lighter and darker tones of one colour. This is what Sarah did in her last house, although she could go darker on the walls like in the photo below.
from Decorpad
LOW CONTRAST NEUTRALS (white, champagne, cream, linen, beige). This is probably the safest route to go and would be very easy to live with.
House Beautiful
from Decorpad
from Decorpad
I couldn't leave a post about seafoam without a couple of photos of actual seafoam.
What is your favourite colour with seafoam? We are all waiting anxiously to see what Sarah says.
No comments:
Post a Comment