Everything's Gone Green: Tips and Hints on Using Green Paint in Your Interior Decorating Scheme

Choosing to paint an interior room in green starts with choosing a specific hue, tone or shade. Go to your local Lowe's, Walmart, Home Depot or Sherwin Williams and you will be presented with a number of increasingly ridiculous synonyms for green colors, but essentially they all fall into one of four categories: pale and yellow greens, midtone greens, deep greens and jewel greens. From these four overarching categories you can choose a number of very creatively named specific greens. Once you've chosen the shade of green that suits your purpose, it's time to put one of the following tips and hints about painting with green to work.

Green Equals Nature

The decision to paint an interior room or object green almost invariably means lending it a natural aspect. Take a look outside almost any room in which you find yourself right now and the dominant color you are likely to see is green. Green is the color of grass, leaves, shrubbery, plants and pretty blonde girls. Green automatically infuses a room with a sense of intractable connection to the world outside. Don't deny green its tenacious desire to become part of the world around it regardless of how abstruse or bizarre a shade of green you pick from the available palette.

Mixed Greens

Choosing to paint interiors with shades of green should be stimulated by a look at how greens work in the real world. To put it bluntly: there is no single, specific green beyond the walls of your house. Take a walk through the closest natural pathway before putting green to work in your interior paint palette. Notice how dark greens mix with light greens. Take a few minutes to really study how the different shades of green work together to create an overall effect. Now head back inside and look over what you've got to work with. You've got walls, trim, floors, ceilings and objects. Think of ways you can put a variety of different shades of green to work to recreate that elegant mixing of shades to give each object its due while ending up with a strong, dominant overall effect of pure Platonic greenness.

Green and Brown

Choosing to paint an interior in green allows you to introduce brown with a certain level of confidence. Choosing to stick with brown can often be a headache because it just doesn't have the pop you may be looking for. Combining green and brown helps to bring in the natural feel of the outdoors to your interior. Brown can be introduced into a green painted room via wood, fabrics, wallpaper or brown paint itself.

Put the Lime in the Coconut

Sure, as of 2011 lime green is a hot color to be found just about everywhere. That will change. You can count on it. Lime green may look stylish during the time of Obama, but when the first African American President is just a memory, you may wish your decision to go with lime green was also a memory. Lime green at any time represents a certain kind of daring decorative choice that can work fine for the audacious. For the rest of you, you can tame the unwanted effect of going with lime green in your interior decorating choice with smart and effective additions of white, red and wood. Tread lightly with the lime and make sure you've got enough of both the interior and exterior of the coconut.

Dark Green

Dark green can be just as daring and bold a decorative choice for interior painting as lime green. This is especially true if you choose to paint your walls or other large surfaces dark green. Darkness envelopes a room more easily than you might imagine. The introduction of sufficient lighting to a dark green painted room can actually have the effect of making the green look less than lustrous. A good way to manage the darkness inside a dark green painted room is through the addition of reflective surfaces. Make sure that your room painted in dark green has mirrors, artwork behind glass, chrome or other types of surfaces that can reflect light to lighten the load of the tone.