Decorating with color is always an adventure. Let the pros help you brush up on the latest ways to pick a palette you'll love.

If you've ever spent an afternoon standing in front of the display cases of color cards at your local home center you know that choosing paint colors for your interiors can be tough. But if you're ready to brave the chip racks, you're in good company: The past few years have seen a sharp growth in homeowners' demands for more color, according to a consensus of interior designers affiliated with the American Society for Interior Design (ASID).

Consumer interest is strongest, the ASID finds, in comforting shades, both warm-like red, which is booming in popularity for the dining room-and serene-like soft blues and lilacs. How can you take advantage of the beautiful colors to create an environment that truly represents you? It's easier and more intuitive than you think, our color experts say.

You Knew It All Along

Whether you're picking one color for a room or for the whole house, take a good look at what you can't live without, says Kenneth Charbonneau, a color marketing consultant and Color Association of the U.S. steering panel member. "I calls these the 'givens,'" he says, "an item or two you must have in your redecorated space. It could be a wonderful Oriental rug, a favorite painting, or a drop-dead sofa fabric. Ignore everything else and look at the colors of the 'givens.' These are the colors that appeal to you-you can take them right up to the paint counter and have them mixed into paint for you." (See "Mix & Match," in the sidebar.)

Designer and ASID member Sharon Hanby-Robie, based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, uses a similar approach when guiding her clients in selecting a palette of colors for a house. "I ask them to show me something that makes them feel good. It might be a pillow, an antique, even a menu. We browse through fabric stores together just to see what colors attract their interest." From these intuitive "grabs," Hanby-Robie can pull perhaps 20 colors for a house-wide scheme, three of which may be dominant.

A Mind-Altering Experience

Color is known to have psychological effects when used in rooms. The "warm" shades on the color wheel, including red, orange, and yellow, will make a room energetic and welcoming, and stimulate the appetite; the "cool" colors, such as blues and greens, are conducive to relaxation and sleep. This may be why red, for example, is so popular for dining rooms, while blue finds its way into many a bedroom-it could be that we gravitate to colors appropriate for our emotional needs in our rooms.

With this in mind, Glidden Paints has divided its 800-plus consumer colors into four "mood collections": Bright & Lively, Relaxed & Cozy, Classic & Neutral, and Natural & Comforting. The company's website (www.glidden.com) explains these categories and presents ideas for using its colors in rooms.

"What do I want this space to 'feel' like when it's done?" says Barbara Richardson, director of color marketing at Glidden. Defining the emotional tone for a room can guide you to a color choice. "I've never met anybody who couldn't answer this question. Light and airy, serious, or lively for the family?" she adds. "You can use color psychology and our mood collections to achieve the atmosphere you want."

But don't forget that neutrals-browns, tans, grays, whites, and blacks-are vital as well, notes Richardson. "They balance a space. They give it depth. The same neutral on trim throughout the house unifies the whole color scheme." Neutrals provide visual "breathing space," between colored zones-whether it's a neutrally colored trim or vestibule, or a neutral family room bridging a rich red dining room and several vivid bedrooms.

White, of course, is a perennial favorite on walls, and comes in hundreds of variations that are really just very pale tints of every shade. White breaks down into warm, creamy varieties-culled from tints of warm colors-and cool, crisp varieties-culled from tints of the cools. Thus white is a neutral that can be "spun" to reinforce the warmth or coolness of the colors around it.

Space Oddities

Colors can also solve spatial problems or produce spatial effects. Light colors make walls or ceilings appear to recede or fall back, visually expanding a space, while dark colors draw a wall forward or a ceiling downward, compressing the viewer's sense of space. So a room that's long and narrow can be "squared off" by being painted dark blue, say, on the two narrow walls to draw them toward the eye, and light blue or white on the long walls, which will seem to push them outward and fatten the space.

Ceiling colors can make all the difference in rooms with non-standard heights; in a tiny but cavernously high kitchen of a pre-war apartment building in New York City, dark brown, dark green, or even slate on the ceiling, perhaps continued down to the cabinet soffits, can humanize the scale of the room. But in a low-clearance tract house, the contrast of a white ceiling above colored walls can raise the ceiling enough to allow for a French provincial makeover that doesn't look crammed into Kansas.

Test Pattern

Experts are absolutely united on one thing: You must test. Kenneth Charbonneau says, "You have to see the paint in the actual room, under all the lighting conditions." Paint patches of color, at least a foot square, on a primed area on the wall or on a plywood board. When you test three reds, Charbonneau points out, you are really testing at least nine reds-because each looks distinctly different under sunlight, indirect daylight, and incandescent light-and candlelight is a fourth possibility. The solution is to choose the one that looks best during the time of day and under the lighting conditions when you will be in the room most. And remember, don't buy gallons of paint to test.

Glidden is now offering a visualization tool for home computers, called Color@Home II. The CD takes some guesswork out of choosing by letting you try the company's hues in sample interior rooms, or on photos of your own rooms that you scan into the program. "The CD is a wonderful new method that lets you try literally hundreds of color combinations without painting a thing," Barbara Richardson says. "But we still do recommend testing a color or two on your walls if you're not sure."

The last word on testing and choosing paint? "Remember when you test that you are also looking for the effects different colors have on each other," says Sharon Hanby-Robie. "A bright yellow wall, say, can reflect yellow that drowns out the white on white cabinets. Colors aren't sitting alone in a house-they need to accentuate each other, and it's a good idea to test them for compatibility."

M I X & MATCH

Sometimes we spend so much time fanning color chips over our desks and tables, we forget we can simply ask for what we want. Virtually all paint retailers will customize a color for you; they will match a color you bring to them, such as a shade on an area rug, a favorite Oxford-cloth shirt, a paint chip from an expensive designer brand-the possibilities are wide open. They match by either eyeballing the color and judging its various chromatic components, or by a spectrometer computer that takes a photo of the object, then performs the same feat digitally.

"We can match a color either way," says Bruce Stark, owner of the Beacon Paint shop on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "We like to use the computer for complex colors, anything out of the ordinary." What do people like to match? "Mostly towels and pillowcases," Stark says. "Sometimes we'll match the color, and they'll say it doesn't look so great. We can adjust it for them to something close that looks better. We're good at that." The oddest colormatching request? "One guy had us do a worm," he says. "It was kind of green. The paint came out looking just like the worm. He was really happy with it."