For those who are not professional designers or artists, choosing the right colors can be somewhat frightening Many people will stick with white walls or neutral colors. That's too bad because color is so much a part of our everyday life.

I'm willing to bet that you have at least once in your life walked into a space that was totally you, and felt like this is the place I want to be! Color (as well as design) has everything to do with that.

The color Wheel originally came about in 1666 when Sir Issac Newton did an experiment using a prism and shining light through it. His discovery of white light containing all the spectrums of color, has been the mainstay of artist and designers ever since.

Here are some basics on how it works.

There are primary colors in the spectrum which are red, yellow and blue. Theses are the colors that every other color is made from. Next there are secondary colors, green, orange and purple. These colors are produced by mixing 2 primary colors together. The intermediate colors are made by mixing primary and secondary colors together.

To see what colors work well together, the wheel become invaluable. If you decided to make a green room, you may not want to paint all the walls the same color. What you might want to think about doing instead is painting one smaller wall a darker green and the rest a lighter shade. It would draw the eye to where you want it to go. When you are undecided about what colors to use as accents, the color wheel comes in very handy there. Look at the colors you chose for the wall. Now look on the opposite side. We chose green so on the wheel the color that shows up on the opposite side is purple. If that pleases you then you have an accent color.

Inspiration for your color scheme can come from many different sources. We all have our favorite colors that make us feel good so go with what you love and make it work.

Any arts and craft store should be able to supply you with a color wheel for very little money. You can also browse on the internet for charts that you can print off for reference.

One more thing about the color wheel, color can be used to show off your personality! If you are an out going kind of person then you may be very comfortable with primary or strong secondary colors like shades of red and orange. If you are the calm kind, then maybe soft blues and greens may be your cup of tea. So take that into account when you are designing.

Go for it!

Using color correctly can make your day!