A Las Vegas Painter’s Advice on Desert Tones, Color and Shades

Many homes in the Las Vegas region belong to HOAs. This means you might not always have complete freedom when it comes to choosing your home’s color. If you enjoy a bit of creativity or you wish to add a slightly unique flavor to your home’s appearance, then you need to know a bit about how color, hue, tint, and tone can work for you and a Las Vegas painter can help.

Las Vegas painters understand how to use all aspects of a color to bring out the best features in your home, even if those colors are sandstone, gray, slate, and beige. They use color in ways that create curb appeal and can make your home a place you enjoy coming home to.

What Color Should You Paint Your House?

A color is any hue, shade, tint or tone, or any combination of them. Beige is a color. Grey is a color. Greige is a color. If your eye can see it, then it is a color. When color swatches get names like Wicker Brown or Golden Tan, those are also colors but their description is beyond basic.

Wicker Brown might be brown, but you can probably guess that it is not the same as Chestnut Brown. It has a different hue, tone or color. When you are choosing paint for your house, you are choosing a combination of different colors, hues, tints, tones, and shades. What’s the difference between all these terms?

Hues Are Seldom Seen in Las Vegas

When artists refer to a hue, they are talking about one of the primary colors on a color wheel. Think basic red, yellow, blue, white, and black. In Las Vegas, you don’t often see primary colors and there is a good reason why. Most homes in Vegas aren’t old. Modern builders and Las Vegas painters have a lot more palette to work with than say, builders and painters in Ohio in 1910.

Still, you might not notice many homes painted blue or green. This makes sense because blue is the color associated with water. That’s why many HOAs and business districts opt for sky blue if they choose blue at all. That’s not to say that hues are never used in Vegas, but they are typically applied by commercial painters who want their clients’ businesses to stand out from the rest.

Residential painters shy away from basic blues and greens because they are not usually associated with a desert climate. Most residential buildings are painted to reflect the overall colors of Las Vegas’ mountains and desert and those colors are not hues.

Las Vegas Painters Throw on Some Shade Only When Necessary

Throwing shade on your neighbor’s new home renovation isn’t very nice. However, if they overused shade in their renovation, then they might want to reconsider. In artistic terms, shade is when black is added to a hue. It’s the difference between chocolate brown and ebony, or fire engine red and maroon. Adding black brings depth to a color and can be used to great effect in some situations. However, shade is not often used in desert landscapes.

It might seem like a shady color would be perfect for a hot climate, but black attracts heat. If you want to keep your home cool on the inside and inviting on the outside, then you might want to read on and learn more about tint.

Read more about paint sheens here.

Tints Are a Las Vegas Painter’s Friend

When you add a lighter color to a primary color the result is a tint. Sky blue is a tint because white is added to primary blue. Grey is a tint because white is added to black. Yellow becomes sunshine yellow or hay yellow when you add a bit of white to it. Tints desaturate a color and lighten it. You will notice that many Vegas homes feature a lot of tints.

In other areas of the country, a tint might be used to accent or offset a dominant and darker shade. Think of those sea blue fishtail shingles on homes in Massachusetts or deep greens on cottages in Oregon. In those scenarios, a tint is used to brighten up a home. Not so in our desert region. In Vegas, shades are used sparingly and tints are used frequently. This keeps our homes cooler inside and cool-looking on the outside.

Las Vegas Landscapes Are a Study in Tone

One of the newer colors to grace Las Vegas homes is the color known as greige. It’s a mix of beige and gray. If you are wondering if greige is a color, or a tint, or a shade, or something else, then wonder no more. It is a tone. When you mix a color with a shade of gray, you end up with a tone.

Olive green is a great example of a tone, and greige is even better. Sandstone, buttercream, and sand dune brown are all examples of tones that you can found throughout Las Vegas. In fact, whether you are looking for the perfect gradations of wheat brown or red clay or off-white, you can probably find the tone you want after driving around town. When it comes to tones, Las Vegas homes rise above the rest.

If you look at most recommended HOA color schemes, you will see several tones and a few tint, and shade options for doors and trim. Only in Las Vegas can a home include three or more brown tones, a brown tint, and a brown shade without looking like a monochromatic brownie dessert.

Tones are excellent at providing contrasts against surrounding landscapes and even against the bright summer sun. Everyone’s eyes need a break from harsh light, and a cooling beige tone can ease a person’s eyes. When thinking of your home’s color, a residential painter can alert you to several landscape contrasts that you may have never thought possible.

If you look at popular home colors across the country, you will notice that the front lawn is often considered as a contrast. As you know, Las Vegas residents don’t usually have lawns. We also don’t usually have snow, which is something to consider when looking at the best tones, shades, tints, and hues for the Las Vegas region.