Decorating your home can be an expensive and exasperating task. Especially if you don?t arm yourself with some knowledge beforehand. These tips below will help you pick colours for interior decorating that will make your home a cohesive personal expression of your tastes.

Draw a colour palette from a large patterned piece

A simple way to pick colours, draw them from a large, patterned piece that you already own ? a piece of artwork, a rug or an upholstered piece of furniture. Match paint, furniture and accessories to colours that appear in this pattern. This will give your room a subtle cohesive appearance and will help feature the patterned piece.

Employ the 60-30-10 rule

This interior design guideline dictates that you should devote 60% of a rooms colour to a dominant hue, 30% to a secondary hue and 10% to an accent colour. This guideline helps maintain visual balance and keeps you from going overboard with bright accent colours or dull neutrals.

Pay attention to the vertical gradient in your colour scheme

There is a reason most ceilings are painted white or beige even when the walls are dark ? rooms tend to look much better if the colour tones are graded from dark to light as you move up vertically. Chose darker tones for low pieces, medium tones for walls and leave your ceiling a light colour.

Take decorating cues from your wardrobe

Even if you are completely flummoxed by choosing colours for your home, take heart ? you?re already well-versed in this process through choosing your clothes. You likely buy clothes that appeal to you and match your complexion, so follow the same rule when decorating.

Consult a colour wheel for matching colours

A colour wheel, which can be found easily through an Internet search, is a tool that arranges colours according to the wavelength of light needed to produce them. This tool is used frequently to determine how to introduce unity or contract into a decorating scheme.

Employ blacks and whites throughout your home

Small accessories in stark black or white play a major role in livening up your colour scheme. These colours define the limits of the spectrum, and therefore they make other colours appear richer by situating them within the full spectrum of colour.