How Lighting Affects Interior Paint Colors

How Lighting Affects Interior Paint Colors

What’s the vital element that all interior designers must consider when selecting paint colors? Lighting is the key! The illumination of a room dramatically influences its appearance, altering its perceived brightness or darkness, its warmth or coolness, and it can deeply transform the initial design idea. For those aiming to design a brightly-lit area with light-toned decorations, choosing a variety of warm whites and yellows is advisable.

However, if your goal is to create a cozy space with dark wood furnishings, then you should choose a cool color palette of blues and grays. This blog post from Painter Malaysia will discuss how lighting affects interior paint colors so that you can make sure your home looks fabulous!

How Artificial Lighting Affect Interior Paint Color

Not everyone is aware of how lighting can affect a paint color and how it makes your look appear. However, if you want to have a bright room, with gentle colors and white furniture you should know how to use artificial lighting.

Artificial lighting is those sources of light that are not natural. They include lamps, ceiling lights, and other types of lighting fixtures you can find inside the room where you want to paint your wall with a neutral color.

When using artificial lighting you need to understand which colors appear more intense under different sources of artificial lighting.

Light colors under artificial lighting will often look brighter and fresher than you think. If your room is painted with a light color, this means that the whole space will also look brighter and airier.

Light colors under artificial lighting tend to absorb less of the yellow/red part of the spectrum, therefore these walls appear whiter. To put it simply: if you paint your wall light blue, it will look even lighter under artificial lighting.

However, dark colors under artificial lighting tend to absorb more of the yellow/red part of the spectrum, therefore you can notice that they appear darker. To put it simply: if your wall is painted with a dark color, it will look even deeper under artificial lighting.

How Natural Lighting Affect Interior Paint Color

Although artificial lighting is important, you shouldn’t forget about natural lighting. Natural lighting is known to enhance the beauty of every color by making it look vibrant and more intense.

Natural light is light that comes from the sun and it is also known as solar light. You can also get natural lighting inside your room by using windows with good exposure to the outside of the house or building where you live.

Natural light will enhance all colors, but some colors look more intense under natural lighting than others. However, there are two main things that you should remember when using natural lighting:

  • The intensity of colors under sun exposure can be quite different than what appears on paint chips because this type of light brings out the warmth/cool textures;
  • Colors might change their appearance according to sunlight direction (shadow). If your goal is also to use one sidewall as an accent wall for instance, then choose a bolder painting technique that will allow you to create interesting effects with shadows cast onto the surface during certain hours throughout the day.

Light colors under natural light will appear more vivid and bright. On the other hand, dark colors will not appear too deep but they will show a lot of texture.

Which Paint to Pick?

If you’re wondering what color to pick for a room, you should consider a couple of things. One would be the lighting. Do you have lamps in the room? Are there any chandeliers or ceiling lights? How about the windows – how much sunlight do they receive? These are all factors to consider when choosing a color.

Additionally, you should choose paint color depending on what mood you want to set your room in. If you want to create a calm and peaceful mood, then darker colors may be a better option for you than light ones. However, if you want your room to feel more energetic, then lighter colors are a better choice.

The New Understanding

We hope you’ve learned something from this blog post, and can use it to help make your next paint color choice. If not, please reach out to us for more information on how we can improve the experience of selecting an interior paint color!

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