Discover inspiration from the most colorful homes in America with this vibrant lookbook and style manual that brings the magic of color into your home—from the author of  Living with Pattern   Personalizing your color palette   may be one of the most important decisions you make in your home. The right combination of hues can set the mood and transform any room from ordinary to magical. Textile designer Rebecca Atwood invites you to take a color journey in this stunning yet practical guide.    In  Living with Color,  you’ll tour beautifully designed homes to see some of the most interesting uses of the rainbow and to gather inspiration for your own spaces. You’ll train your eye to notice how color lives all around you, from the pink light bouncing off a building you see every day to the exact blue of the ocean on your last getaway. You can even learn how to express yourself through your own custom palette with Rebecca’s accessible, illustrated overview of color theory. As you embark on your color hunt and begin to trust your own instincts,  Living with Color  will embolden you to breathe life into every part of your home. “More than just a style guide, Atwood’s book takes the conversation around color in refreshingly unexpected directions.” —Business of Home “Atwood teaches readers how to break their relationship with beige and create a color palette that not only resonates with their aesthetic, but also makes them happy.” — Martha Stewart online “Atwood pulls back the curtain on the profession in the best of ways, showing readers how to find beauty in the simple craftsmanship of the ordinary, and how to channel those findings into proper interiors.” — Architectural Digest “Atwood shows how to notice color in the world, and to be inspired by it.” — Publishers Weekly REBECCA ATWOOD received her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design before beginning her career designing and consulting for major retailers. Today, she is a textile designer, an artist who blends traditional techniques with hand painting, and the author of Living with Pattern . Her interest in pattern is deeply rooted in her childhood on Cape Cod and her everyday observations of life in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband. Introduction My Color Story I’ve always been drawn to color, and my parents encouraged my love of art at an early age. At just five years old, I had books on Monet and Renoir, and my earliest memories are of drawing with my two sisters. We would lie on the floor and color for hours, with the sunlight streaming in through the big glass door and our crayons, pencils, watercolors, and giant pieces of paper splayed out around us. At some point, our grandfather gave us a professional set of Pentel markers, and they seemed like a rainbow in a box compared to the simple primary colors we’d used up until then. Housed in a golden case, they were a beautiful object unto themselves, and the most fascinating thing about this rainbow was the multiple versions of the same colors—warm blue and cool blue, a true red and a burgundy. The marker set expanded my color palette, and with all these tools at my fingertips, I became hooked. As I got older, my color story expanded. Growing up on Cape Cod, I was drawn to the beach in the off-season: the quieter time of year when the individual softer, muted tones of the natural landscape are highlighted because of the limited color palette. This is where I learned to see the beauty of neutrals—not your typical desaturated gray or tan but rather multicolored, chromatic neutrals, which I will teach you all about in this book.  Artists have long been drawn to the Cape because of its serenity, juxtaposed with dramatic light. In the course of one day, the sand shifts from a soft, pale caramel to a bright cream at midday and, finally, to an ethereal glowing pink before the sun sets. There are infinite hues within these colors of sand, and within all of nature—the sky, the sea, a field, or trees in the distance. There is always tonal variation, with the light picking up and highlighting the different textures in the landscape. I would sit on the beach, looking for these transformations and watching the waves coming in and going out, studying how the sky and water met at the horizon. I realized that this calm but colorful world was where I wanted to live. Over time, my childhood predilection for drawing gave way to painting and making things with my hands. Painting became my greatest form of expression, and it’s how I learned to understand color. I now recognize that I was attempting to mirror the beauty I saw in nature and the world around me. In middle school, I took a watercolor course where, in preparation for the class, we were given a shopping list of the “basic” colors we would need. We had a warm red and a cool red, as well as neutral hues like ochre and burnt sienna. I remember thinking, “Who would want these bland, boring hues when there’s blue and yellow?” But thr