ColorSmart

I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine. A very dear friend.

Blog-World-Friends and Real-World-Friends, meet Behr ColorSmart.

Behr ColorSmart lets you browse colors and then shows you what colors would complement your chosen color(s). Once you have your colors picked out you can "paint" one of their sample rooms or you can upload your own photo to "paint". It's pretty slick.

I used it to help pick paint colors for my kitchen and living room... and now I'm back to it with my office-ish room.

I'm still playing around with different colors for the furniture (browns?) and the walls (light blues or greens?).

I found this brown using ColorSmart. It's Behr's Belgian Sweet.

This time around I've decided not to try to find a blue that matches my Ikea dresser because I want to see what the ColorSmart will come up with based just on this brown as an accent color. (You can add more colors that you want to coordinate with. If I added the blue for the dresser it would base the complementing colors off both the blue and brown together.)

ColorSmart comes up with 8 different palettes when you choose to "Coordinate" with your color as the main or accent color.

Here is one of the palettes that include colors similar to that of the dresser:

The colors changed a bit bringing them into the Blog and may also vary depending on your computer screen, but it gives you an idea of what ColorSmart does.

It's a fun way to play with colors. I tend to get overwhelmed when I go to the hardware store and see the huge walls of color samples. This tool helps me to narrow down what I want and focus on just the colors I'm interested in while bringing in complementing colors I may not have considered. You can also adjust the suggested colors by clicking on them in the palette and adjusting the amount of red, yellow, or blue in them and how light or dark they are.

Other paint brands have options of exploring paint colors, too... like Valspar and Benjamin Moore. {So far Behr is my favorite to play with.}

I still haven't committed to colors for the office-ish room. It's {long} a process.