Painting & Optics—How to Change Your Indoor Environment

The EPA funded a study conducted by The National Human Activity Pattern, to understand how humans might be impacted by pollutants in our various indoor and outdoor environments. What the studied showed was we spend 87% of our lives indoors!

Our indoor environments can influence our mood and well-being and can contribute to our overall happiness or misery. This is why Interior Design is so important. Our lighting, whether natural or artificial, the scale of things, the materials & colors we use, all affect the experience that we have in any space.

Say want to paint your room to add some color and pizazz. Lighter and cooler colors make the space appear larger. Darker colors make them appear more closed and smaller to the eye. The arrangement of colors or textures in an environment changes the perspective, making the room appear taller, longer, wider, or highlighting a particular element.

Depending on the lighting, the size and shape of the room it may be to your benefit to use some Color Theory 101 to analyze your space and how best to add color with paint to existing light to change your environment for the better.

The drawing above is a quick guide to show some possibilities for changing your environment using only paint colors, their contrasts, and locations to paint them to give off different optics and vibes.