Get a sense of flow from room to room by using the same color scheme throughout your home. DIY Decorating & Design host Nancy Golden demonstrates the rules of color transitioning, which permit you to use the same color scheme throughout a home without making every room look the same. If you're at loose ends about how to begin a decorating scheme, start with a pile of decorating magazines. Tear out pages with looks that appeal to you to get an idea what you like and where to begin. Begin a color scheme by choosing a personality print -- a fabric you love -- with a minimum of three colors in its pattern. The colors of the personality print will set the color palette. You'll use the three basic colors of the personality print, plus their tints, tones and shades, throughout the house. One color will serve as the primary color in the first room, with the other colors of secondary importance. In the next room, a less important color moves into dominance. Use fabrics and accessories to support the dominant and secondary color choices in each room. The personality print used in the kitchen sets this home's color scheme. Terra cotta, buttercream and green are the print's main colors, but it also has touches of blue. A lighter shade of the dark terra cotta used in the kitchen is employed in the family room (figure A), and the buttercream of the kitchen becomes a lighter ivory in the family room. Using different shades and tones of the same color keeps the color flowing from room to room, giving a sense of continuity. In the bedroom a more saturated, darker terra cotta is used, and this time green is used sparingly. The vanilla and ivory tones of the kitchen and family room give way to golden tones in the bedroom (figure B). The minor blue of the main color palette becomes the dominant color in a little boy's room, where it's combined with khaki, a variation of the cream tone, and a touch of dark terra cotta (figure C). In the little girl's room the entire color palette of greens, blues, terra cotta and khaki is watered down to soft pastel tints of the primary color palette (figure D). An entry sets the tone by combining all the colors of the home. You don't have to use paint or fabric: a silk bouquet or work of art that includes the home's basic color palette will do.
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