Monochromatic

• Choose paint from the same color family to create a monochromatic color scheme. An example is painting your walls with white and off-white stripes or painting one wall brown and painting the rest of your walls beige. Other monochromatic color schemes are maroon, red and pink; orange, salmon and rust; olive, mint and green; and violet, lavender and plum.
  
  

Complementary

• Complementary colors are those that are directly opposite each other on the color wheel. One way to paint a room using complementary colors is to paint your wall from 3 feet up in one color, such as from the dado rail up to the ceiling or crown molding, and from 3 feet down in another color, such as from the dado rail to the floor or floor molding. Complementary color schemes are orange and blue, mint and pink, yellow and violet, black and white and blue-green and red-orange.
  
  

Triadic

• Three colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel create a triadic color scheme. One way to incorporate this scheme when painting your room is to paint one wall in two colors and the other three in three different colors or paint stripes on the top half of your wall using the two adjacent colors and paint the bottom half with the third color. Color combinations for a triadic color scheme are green, orange and violet; red, yellow and blue; and blue-green, yellow-orange and red-violet.
  
  

Split-Complementary

• The split-complementary color scheme uses a color and the two colors beside its complement. Use this color scheme in the same way as the triadic color scheme. Color combinations in the split-complementary color scheme include green, red-orange and red-violet; blue, yellow-orange and red-orange; yellow, red-violet and blue-violet; and orange, blue-green and blue-violet.