4 Creative Ways To Split Colors

Here in the Washington D.C. area, homeowners are increasingly requesting creative design ideas from their painting cntractors. Frequently, they desire to use more than one wall color in a room, but they are not sure how to achieve a crisp, elegant effect.Our previous post discussed various ways of achieving this with natural wall breaks, but this can also be effected by creating artificial breaks.

One technique used by many professional painters is to install chair rail in a room. This horizontal moulding adds sophistication in itself, but it also creates a dividing line to have different colors above and below. Conventionally, a lighter color will go above the rail and a darker color below, but a more contemporary trend is to reverse this.

Ogee moulding, a thin, elegantly shaped strip of wood, also offers a myriad of possibilities for adding color to a room. A residential painting company such as Manor Works can install this in a horizontal strip 3 to 6 inches below your crown moulding, creating a separate wall space in between which is perfect for bringing new color to a room. It can be painted the same color as the mouldings to create the illusion of a large old-world moulding, or a third color to create a stripe around the top of the walls.

A very elegant and sophisticated method of combining chair rail and ogee moulding is to create shadow boxes. This would allow for up to three coordinating wall colors: one color inside the box frames, another outside the box frames, and a third above the chair rail. In this case, the ogee and chair rail should either be a simple white or the same color as one of the wall surfaces to avoid overwhelming the eye.

Apart from using mouldings to create a break, house painters can create unlimited possibilities using painters' tape. By taping off a vertical or horizontal area, stripes can be painted in any color and direction to create a multitude of creative looks. Gradient striping is one classy technique that can be subtle or bold. This technique creates a light-to-dark fading appearance by painting a thick, light stripe horizontally across a wall, then painting progressively darker shades of the same color in thin stripes down the wall.

For more professional design ideas and color tips, contact a professional house painter. Manor Works Painting offers free color consultations to our customers in suburban Maryland and northern Virginia. Our excellent painting can be seen in fine homes in Gaithersburg, Brookeville, Silver Spring, Waterford, Paeonian Springs, Middleburg and the whole Washington D.C. metropolitan area.

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