Color and Light

an illusion of opennessAs I work to make my house mine by painting every wall possible, I figured it would be only be appropriate to post something related to color and light. You can’t imagine how many hours I’ve spent staring at paint chips wondering how they’d look on my walls. So what do you think of a candy lime and mandarin orange kitchen? Wheeee!!!

1955: Color and Light

Color and light can increase or decrease the size of a room and of the objects in it. They can hold a room together or, seemingly, push it apart. In terms of your home, here is what these optical illusions ~ that is what they really are ~ can do.

Warm colors are said to advance, to come closer to you, than cool colors. They seem to pull the walls of a room together, making it look smaller. They unite furniture groups; separate chairs appear to be larger and closer focusing your attention on them. One warm-colored wall almost immediately attracts your eye, becoming a center of interest. High ceilings may be visually lowered and the narrow walls of long rooms brought into scale when a warm color is applied to them.

Cool, or receding, colors make rooms optically larger by pushing out the walls, and low ceilings are raised. Furniture may look smaller and seem farther away from you. An oversize sofa in a soft green, for instance, will not appear to be as big as it actually is.

Oddly enough, the very light tints of all colors ~ warm or cool ~ and most whites impart an illusion of openness and spaciousness.

Source: Commery, E. W. and C. Eugene Stephenson. How to Decorate and Light Your Home. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1955.
~ p. 37-38 ~