Steps For Painting Over Dark Walls With A Light Color (2024)

FAQs

Steps For Painting Over Dark Walls With A Light Color? ›

When painting over dark walls with light paint colors, use a white primer. Using a primer will help to ensure that your color comes out true when dry, with no dark base color muting a light one or a light base color making it impossible to get bold color coverage.

Use multiple coats of the best primer to cover dark paint

Usually, you can get away with one coat of primer. But when it comes to painting over a dark color with a lighter one, two coats of primer(literally) put an extra layer between the colors and reduce the chances that the dark color will bleed through.

For maximum coverage over dark paint colors, you need to apply two coats of high-quality paint primer and sealer. It is important to allow the primer to dry thoroughly before applying the next coat. Also, surface preparation is very much important when it comes to cover an existing dark interior color.

Paint the adjoining light-colored walls first. “Don't worry if you get paint on what will be your accent wall—the dark paint will cover up whatever lighter paint found its way there. After the lighter wall dries, tape off that edge so the dark color doesn't bleed onto your new paint,” Colaneri and Carrino advise.

Covering a dark paint color with a lighter paint color will require multiple coats of new paint. It may make more sense to cover the old color in a primer, which is less expensive than your paint. This way, you will only need 1 to 2 coats of your new paint.

You probably don't need a primer. If the current wall is smooth, clean and covered with the same type of paint (both are oil-based for example), you can head straight for the paint. You need to fill holes, spackle and sand*, maybe even cut a new piece of drywall in to the existing wall.

Painting over bright, wild or dark colors is an easy design fix, but may not be as easy as it seems. Color families such as reds, greens, oranges, and blues can be a real challenge.

The hardest colors to paint over include dark colors like orange, red, green, and blue. These colors are too dark that they are hard to cover up. Most of the time, it is ideal that you remove the paint using a sandblaster or a paint stripper rather than painting over it.

Paint From Dark to Light

It is easier to see your object develop if you paint in the darkest colors first, and then move on to the next value, and then the next, and so on.

What order should you paint a wall? ›

When painting over dark walls with light paint colors, use a white primer. Using a primer will help to ensure that your color comes out true when dry, with no dark base color muting a light one or a light base color making it impossible to get bold color coverage.

The aim is to make the room appear larger and lighter, so avoid any dark colour on the ceiling. White is always a safe choice, but you could also go for pale tones of other paint colours, from greens to golds.

When painting over dark walls with light paint colors, use a white primer. Using a primer will help to ensure that your color comes out true when dry, with no dark base color muting a light one or a light base color making it impossible to get bold color coverage.

For some of the best paint to cover dark walls, try an all-in-one Primer and Sealer tinted in a light grey. Colours like Seagull Grey or Ultra Pure White in the Behr Marquee are great choices. For a warmer white, look for Behr's Polar Bear Tint, for a cooler white, go with Behr's White.

Paint From Dark to Light

It is easier to see your object develop if you paint in the darkest colors first, and then move on to the next value, and then the next, and so on. Take a look at the images below and note how you can see the object develop because I painted it in order from darks to lights.

Decorate in white

When it comes to reflecting light, no colour does this better than white. So, if your rooms are dark, and nothing else seems to fix it, giving your walls a fresh coat of white paint should make the world of difference.