Tips for Choosing Your Nursery Color Scheme

ECOS Paints 08/20/2020
Tips for Choosing Your Nursery Color Scheme

When people mention nurseries, the first images that come to mind are often color: soft blue baby blankets and lacy pink cribs. Still, there is an entire spectrum of colors to choose from beyond pink and blue. While there’s nothing wrong with using traditional pinks and blues, it’s good to be aware of all your options when it comes to decorating your little one’s space. If you want to explore the rest of the rainbow for your baby but aren’t sure where to start, here are some tips for choosing your nursery color scheme.

Balance Fun With Soothing

As we mentioned in a previous blog, color can influence your mood, and the same goes for you and your baby. Warm colors—like red, yellow, and orange—are associated with energy, fun, and creativity. Cool colors—like blues and greens—are associated with rest and serenity. This rule isn’t 100% set in stone, though. Different shades of a color are often associated with different emotions. Dark purple is often considered a bold color, but a light purple or lavender is considered more soothing.

When it comes to your baby’s space, you don’t want to go too far to either end of the spectrum. It’s always good for a kid’s room to be a place of fun and creativity, but babies spend most of their time sleeping. When choosing a color scheme, you want to walk the line between both. Consider soft, soothing blues brightened up with pops of orange, or sunny yellow tempered with natural green. Be wary of going overboard with colors, though. Too many colors and patterns can become busy and chaotic which will work against any emotion you’re trying to convey.

Pick Paints That Can Grow with Your Child

When you’re looking at that precious little face, it’s easy to think that your little one’s youth will last forever. But any parent will tell you that children grow up faster than anyone wants to believe. That means growing out of clothes, growing out of diapers, and growing out of the pretty pastel color scheme you picked out for them. While having to redecorate your child’s room as they grow older is inevitable, you can make life easier on yourself by choosing a color scheme that will grow with your child or that is easily adaptable.

Remember Your Furniture

Baby furniture is a huge expense for new parents. For many, they can’t pick a custom crib to fit their desired nursery design. If you are in this situation, make sure you keep your furniture in mind as you select a color scheme. There are many ways of working with the furniture you have to achieve the look you have in mind. If you can’t, consider refinishing the furniture, so it matches your intended color scheme. On the other hand, if you can buy the furniture new, be sure you buy furniture with your color scheme in mind.

Select a Theme

Sometimes, simply picking colors that look good together can be challenging. It may make it easier to pick a theme for your nursery first. In most cases, a color scheme will naturally follow. For example, a mermaid-themed nursery will likely make you gravitate toward blue, white, and beige, with accents of pink. A jungle theme will give you different shades of green, brown, and a touch of yellow for a furry lion’s face. Or, you can choose to center the room around a favorite animal: black and white zebras, yellow and brown giraffes, or grey elephants.

Choose Colors That Complement Natural Lighting

When babies are first born, their eyes are sensitive to bright light. When it comes to lighting a nursery, most people recommend focusing on natural light. That means favoring bright sunlight and choosing bulbs that mirror natural light rather than fluorescents. The lighting in the room affects how colors appear. Some colors, like lavender and pale yellow, tend to look better in natural light while some tend to look more washed out than others.

Test Your Colors

A color on a small card can look very different than a color on a wall. Don’t just bring the paint swatch into the room; put the color on a decently sized piece of wall. This will give you a better sense of the undertones in the paint and how they will look on your nursery’s wall with the room’s light. Also, if you are trying out more than one color, be careful not to paint your samples right next to each other. A color that looks good next to another color may not look as good by itself.

Think About Focus

Many interior designers will tell you that room designs often center around a central focal point. This is something that you can keep in mind when considering color schemes. What in the room do you want to draw your attention first? Is it an accent wall? A piece of furniture? A wall decoration? The color of your focal point will help you determine complementary colors for the rest of the room.

We have mentioned the 60-30-10 rule before. It’s a good thing to keep in mind here. This rule is a pretty foolproof design tool for how much of a color you want to exist in a room. One color should take up 60% of the space, the next should take up 30%, and the last should take up 10% of the space. If an object in the room is meant to draw your eye, its color is probably going to be the 10% in your room. From here, it’s easy to choose two other colors to make up your scheme. The 60% should be a color that is complimented well by the 10%, and the 30% is usually a neutral color that balances the other two well.

Choosing your nursery color scheme doesn’t have to be limited to just pink or blue. That doesn’t mean that it has to be an impossibly complicated process, either. Trust your instincts. When it comes time to paint your nursery walls or baby’s crib, come back to ECOS Paints for your zero VOC* primer and a rainbow’s worth of paint choices.


*Zero VOC: Conforms to CDPH 01350 (VOC emissions test taken at 11, 12, & 14 days for classroom and office use).

Tips for Choosing Your Nursery Color Scheme

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