Using a mood board will give you a direction for your creativity, somewhere to crystallise your thoughts and a way to share your ideas with others.

Begin by choosing your main base colour from the colour wheel. This might be a colour you particularly like. Most people are always drawn to a certain colour. Use the colour wheel to look at what colours go with existing colour items and decide whether to go for a tonal, harmonious, or complementary scheme.

Colour schemes

For best results, choose one of the following schemes.

1. Tonal - use just one colour but varying tones of it throughout a room or use more than one colour but all with the same depth of tone.

2. Harmonious - pick colours next to each other or near each other on the wheel. These schemes generally give a look that's easy to live with and are tranquil and restful.

3. Complementary - or 'contrasting' colours lie opposite each other on the colour wheel. Complementary colours generally inject some life into a scheme, are more daring and will make more of an impact but might not be so easy to live with.

Create a mood

Interior design - Creating a mood

Try using warm, advancing colours in areas where you want people to feel welcomed such as living rooms, dining rooms and halls. You may want to make your bathroom a relaxing, stress free spa with watery colours reminiscent of the sea. Or you may want to nudge your family to get going in the morning and inject some energy with splashes of zesty acid pastels. Take your inspiration from nature.

You may want your dining room to be smart and formal for lots of corporate entertaining with navy blue or you may want a relaxed, informal feel where all the family can relax.

A chic, contemporary bedroom could be conjured from layering neutrals or create a dramatic boudoir with purples and reds.

Play around with lighting to create moods for different situations, for example, romantic, practical, formal, entertaining etc.

Linking rooms with colour

You may have loads of ideas for different colour schemes in each room of your house and be dying to give them all a try. But stop and think of the overall effect when all the doors are open and you can see into each room. In a smaller house this can tend to look a bit of a mish-mash.

If you'd like to draw the whole scheme together, choose an overall colour for the entire house and then use it in different ways in each room. Larger houses are slightly more forgiving as long as you pay attention to the meeting points.

Choose harmonious colours. You could paint one room blue, the adjacent one a greeny blue, the next purple etc.

Alternatively stick to one colour but use a different tone of it for each room, for example, going from a pale shade of blue to a dark one. This works especially well if your rooms open into one another. If one room is wallpapered, try picking out one shade from it to paint the next room or use the background colour of the wallpaper as your base colour.

To unify your whole house, keep all the woodwork the same colour - preferably white.

Find out more about the impact of colour schemes...