Pick the perfect paint palette

It's time to paint: you're staring at a table cluttered with multiple paint chips and fan decks.

How on earth do you narrow it down?

Luckily, there are numerous tools and tricks that can help make the decision-making process easier, and perhaps even put the fun back in picking paint colours.

DESIGN-SEEDS.COM

Created by Jessica Colaluca as a unique approach to exploring her passion for colour through design blogging, Design-Seeds.com is a terrific website for those looking for colour inspiration and design-savvy ideas.

Jessica creates paint palettes that include an original concept image (usually from objects and scenes found in nature or still-life landscapes), and four or five directly correlated paint colours derived from the original.

If I need a boost of colour inspiration, her blog and Pinterest site are where I know I will find it.

VOICEOFCOLOR.COM

A super website with a focus on colour trends pertaining to atmosphere and mood, voiceofcolor.com (affiliated with Pittsburg Paints) shows users how to pull and combine paint hues in real-life environments.

Browse the trends section for rooms with multi-views, or click on their digital colour section to upload photos of your own then envision new and exciting hues with the help of their Color Visualizer. Super easy!

PAINT STORES

Never pick your final paint colours in a paint store, but definitely seek out amazing ideas and colour combinations there.

The perfect place to find success is at your local paint store: all paint brands spend copious amounts of money on colour research, branding, and marketing to better serve you — their paint-happy consumers.

Pick up a variety of brochures and samples showcasing their star colour palettes and trends for the upcoming year. Once you're home you may find the perfect palette that works for you.

NATURE

It's a bit of a no-brainer — the colour combinations and palettes you see in nature are fool-proof…. 

if Mother Nature has created it, you know it's absolutely going to work. Think of the shades waltzing through a wheat field in the middle of August; the myriad of silvers, grays, creams, and burnt ochres you find in river rocks lining the edges of any shoreline. The possibilities are endless, and plentiful.

Take a hike, look back through favourite destination holiday photos. We don't always realize it in the moment, but finding beauty in the palette nature provides will always produce a stunning combination.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.