Interior Room Painting Ideas

There are a lot of places to find inspiration for new color choices and accents for room painting. Ideas can come from many places including home store advertising flyers, catalogs and magazines, or TV and movies. If you look around you'll find many good, and bad choices for painting and decorating your room. We've included in this article some interior painting tips that we thought would fall into the good idea column.

Try Deep Colors on Walls

Rejuvenating a room can be as easy as adding a new, dynamic color to your walls or even just one wall of a room. This can be a quick and easy way to revive and renew the feel of your home without lots of work or expense. In a room with existing white or off–white trim and ceiling paint, adding an accent color to the walls can be done in one day.

Painting all the walls a deep, intense color and the trim white like this can make a room feel regal and refined. Using white on the ceiling will reinforce this motif. This is a particularly good look for older homes with wide, ornate moldings, but can also work well in a newer townhouse or condo with lots of door and window trim.

For a touch of class, try using a deep color such as burnt orange or dark red to accent one wall of a living room or bedroom. Having one wall a much deeper color will focus attention there and distract from other parts of the room. This can make a narrow room look larger and more inviting or make your living room the focal point of your home.

Off–White Adds Warmth

To add warmth to your room, try using a dark, off-white, like antique or bone white, on ceilings and trim. The darker color will bring less attention to the ceiling than if a traditional white is used and it will feel lower and therefore make the room feel smaller and cozier. The darker trim adds to this feeling, especially when using earthtone wall colors. But that doesn't mean this is not a good choice to accent bright wall colors too, darker ceiling and trim paint will help any room that needs a little warming up.

Paint Wall Stripes

Another way to put some pop into your room decor is to paint vertical stripes on your walls. This is another scheme that works well when used on just one wall or the whole room. Stripes can be a good idea for an accent on one wall in a living room or bedroom or for painting a bathroom or kitchen.

Varied stripe widths and colors can also add pizzazz to your room, especially if you use bright, vibrant colors like red and yellow.

For a more conservative but still daring scheme, use muted earthtone stripes on your walls. Add a bit of sophistication to your living room using two subtle colors of alternating stripes like biege and bone white. Wide stripes of about 10 inches, using muted colors like this can soften the striping effect making it blend with room decor to tie the room together.

Venetian Plaster and Faux Finishes

Other ideas for painting interior walls that work well in moderations are venetian plaster and faux finishes. Venetian plaster is a spackle or mud–like material that is applied to the wall to create a rough, random finish. The dry plaster is polished to create a sheen and the appearance of a solid plaster/masonry wall. This wall finish can be quite dramatic and may be best used on one wall rather than an entire room.

For painting a whole room with a faux finish is probably a better choice than Venetian plaster or stripes. Faux finishes can include many different processes such as sponge and rag rolling, dragging and craft paper finishes as well as stone and marble finishes, antique and distressed effects. The best finishes for walls are probably dragging and craft paper effects. These processes can be used to create a wallpaper look with either regular or random patterns.

Sponge painting can also be a good choice for faux finishing walls, the finish pictured here is a combination of sponging over a craft paper finish. Most sponge painting effects using one or two applications are best suited for a bathroom or kid's room. For the more grown–up areas of the house, dragging and craft paper effects will accent decor with more sophistication.