Color Patterns for Home Painting

Pattern unifies colors and textures with design, bringing new vitality and rhythm to a room. While it may feel safe to limit pattern to fabrics in the room, you can establish the style and personality of a room with pattern on your walls. Stripes, faux wood or stone, checks, plaids, and stenciled designs can all be created with a brush and paint. The key to using painted patterns successfully is to know how patterns will appear on walls and how they will interact.

Wallpaper can also set a theme or provide a supportive background for other design features in a room. Today, the variety of wall coverings is enormous, from playful borders and linen look-alikes to embossed wall coverings designed to look like stucco, pressed tin, or plaster fresco. Most of the textured wall coverings carried at Lowe's can be painted to complement your color scheme. Consult a Home Painting Specialist for advice on choosing and installing the right covering for your walls.

Pattern Scale

The size of a design motif or repeated line in a pattern is known as scale. Scale can be small, medium, or large. Small-scale patterns have the softest effect, since they tend to read as textured or solid from a distance. Use them with solids, or as visual relief among other patterns. Medium-scaled patterns are more versatile because they retain their design even from a distance, yet rarely overpower other patterns. You can easily use them with small-and large scale patterns. Use large-scale patterns with care since large, bold patterns look even bolder over large areas. They can create an atmosphere of grandeur in a large room, but in small room large-scale patterns have the effect of drawing the walls closer and consuming space.

Pattern Style

The patterns you may sue to decorate your home range from realistic depictions of nature - most commonly flowers, leaves and wood or stone - to abstracts and geometrics such as stripes, dots and plaids. The lines in a room will suggest how to choose and apply pattern. In a room with a high ceiling, avoid strong vertical patterns, instead, try a random pattern or one with horizontal design. Vertical stripes can raise the ceiling in a low-ceilinged room. In an angular room, patterns that have dominant motifs will be broken as they go in and out of corners. A better choice to unify walls is a small-scale design with no noticeable repeats.