Dark Paint in Nursery?

Sounds pretty dark to me. How about a white wall or a pale butter yellow, with light yellow curtains (maybe gingham?)

why would you want a dark nursery?? it sounds pretty dismal. i think the baby and growing child would like bright.

sometimes burnt orange can be very pretty. In a nursery, though, I'd paint the one wall in question a very light colour, such as very pale pumpkin or butter yellow. I'd even go so far as to paint another wall the same as the one in question. Does the room get a lot of light during the day? What is the furniture like? Bulky? Steamlined? Minimalist? With bulky furniture or a lot of furniture, you do not want a colour that is too extreme in your face, but one that fades in the background, because it can just overwhelm.

If you have the time/budget/will, why not lighten the burnt orange a few shades and compliment it with butter yellow, you can make a mural (even with stick on decals) of a summer's day in a park or something. Orange on walls creates energy. Yellow is peaceful, light blue calms. light greens imitate nature, plants and grasses. Just my opinion, to put dark colours in a nursery will not encourage a child even a newborn to explore their surroundings. Good luck, and I for one would be interested in seeing the finshed results.

color is such a personal thing that it doesn't lend itself well to advice-giving. what one person things is a fantabulous combination gives others the horrors. that said:

personally, i would paint the other wall to match, and then diffuse the color by using a lighter paint (watered down, possibly quite a bit) to do a colorwash. in my rather limited experience, solid colors are very harsh and give an enclosing feeling due to their high saturation and contrast with other items. broken colors are more open and tend to recede more, lending themselves to blending with other colors well.

try the experiment on a piece of white posterboard first to get some idea of what it will look like. try using different brushstrokes, ragging, or sponging in different corners of the posterboard to see which effect looks best to you.

without seeing the room, or the colors involved it is difficult to say how the lighter wall would work. in my mind, it would make that wall look larger in contrast to the darker walls around it. unless you are going to do something unique with that wall (i.e.

other colors that are in the room should also be taken into consideration. what type and color is the flooring? trim, including doorways? how about the other items that you know will have to be in the room? all of these colors bounce off of and influence each other. not to mention the natural lighting, although it sounds as though this room has little of that.

if this room really has no windows to speak of, it is very daring of you to paint it with what sounds like such a dark color. it will really be up to how much you break that color up with other items and colors in the room to avoid the "dark little closet" syndrome. if your budget allows, perhaps you could repaint it in a creamy yellow-beige. that way, if there are really no windows you have provided your own artificial sunlight when the color reflects from the wall.

good luck!

Please see photos of how the nursery turned out. It gets plenty of light, and am happy wih the outcome. Thank you all for your feedback.

I found this really great article on painting baby and children's rooms here:

www.decorating-kids-rooms.net/painting-kid-rooms-and-colors-to...

It discusses the best colors to choose. It also provides some interesting info on how children tend to respond to different room colors.

Hope that helps,

Andrea