Finding your color inspiration

Finding your personal color inspiration is key to so many design decisions you will make in your life! From using the colors in your wardrobe to listening to your own instincts over other peoples’ contemporary paint color trends, it will give you the confidence to make a big color change and help you pick your interior paint colors. I think the best advice JAC can give to anyone trying to work out their own color identity or kitchen color schemes is to go from your gut, particularly if you have have no idea where to start when picking an interior color scheme. Often we find that people have difficulty knowing what colors make them feel or act a certain way, or that they are "supposed" to follow some basic color rules in their own homes. My answer to that is, there are no real rules when it comes to deciding what colors speak to you. And yet it's super important to get this right for so many reasons - getting it wrong can be expensive and put you in a really bad mood. As we all know from our psych 101 class, colors can make us feel certain ways, and can cause us to react more aggressively or make us more mellow. Knowing what colors reeve you up or calm you down is important to your overall sanity and happiness quotient, a life long pursuit. At JAC, we try not to get hung up on particulars, like the amount of natural light in a space, the architecture, the size of a room or its orientation. Instead, we try to use our natural intuition when it comes to selecting colors, taking our lead from the personality of the client. You can do this yourself by creating a mood board that will help remind you of where you find contentment and pleasure in life. Generally the more intel you can collect and place together in one spot, like a mood board, the better you will be at nailing your exact color inspiration. Putting together a mood board is a simple and fun exercise in itself, and can lead you in creative directions that maybe you didn't know were possible. Starting with pics from nature and art will help to form your visual sense of whats appealing to you. You can do this exercise for just one room to start with, even a tiny powder room to really narrow down the brief. Even take a trip to your local paint store to pull swatches that make you happy. Add inspirational images, swatches, postcards, personal photos, cuttings from magazines, your own sketches and doodles, fabric and wallpaper samples, etc. Narrow down 3-4 colors and add in some inspirational visuals like pictures from favorite pieces of hand me down jewelry you might have from your grandmother, or a photo of a vintage rug you love. Throw in some pics of favorite art objects and rooms you love then combine all these photos together. It’s much easier to see the colors, patterns and styles you naturally gravitate towards when they’re laid out this way. Now see what colors keep recurring and voila, you just may have hammered out your true self in a color!

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