If your tastes are eclectic, any style of chair slipcovers will do. But if you want the slipcovers to be in harmony with their surroundings, some planning is required. Colors and patterns aren't just surface coverings, they're also emotional stimulators. And an understanding of the effects that colors and their combinations have, will help you in selecting your chair slipcovers.

When talking about colors for chair slipcovers, the following terms are often used:

• Hue is the same as color.
• Value refers to how light the color is and is described with tints, shades, and tones.
• A tint is a color which has white added to it.
• A shade is a color with black added.
• A tone is produced by adding gray to a color.
• Intensity is a measure of how pure a color is.

Each color or hue is also described as being warm or cool, with reds and yellows considered warm and blues and greens, cool. The temperature of a color has both an emotional effect and a spatial effect. Warm colors not only seem cozy, but they also appear closer than they actually are. Likewise, cool colors seem to be both emotionally and physically more distant. This fact lets you adjust both the mood and apparent size of a room, by choosing warm or cool chair slipcovers.

The three basic colors which combine to make all others, are the primaries red, blue, and yellow. Equal parts of the primaries produce the secondary colors of green, orange, and violet. Mixing equal parts of primary and secondary colors creates the intermediate hues. Knowing how colors relate to each other can help you pick appealing combinations for your chair slipcovers.

Color combinations can either be monochromatic, analogous, or complimentary. A monochrome color scheme uses all one color with a variety of intensities and values. Because of their similar nature, it's easy to create a unified look this way.

Similar to monochrome, is an analogous color scheme. This uses two or more colors that are next to each other on the color spectrum. For instance, if the dominant room color was blue, green or blue-green chair slipcovers should fit right in.

If the color spectrum is shaped into a circle, you have a color wheel. And colors on opposite sides of the color wheel make complimentary color schemes. So red and green could mix together or orange and blue. Complimentary colors can also use the adjacent colors to the opposites. So instead of red and green, you could use red and blue-green and yellow-green. Or a double split of red-orange and red-violet with blue-green and yellow-green.

Color theory is helpful for reducing trial and error, but it won't make decisions for you. The colors and schemes you use for your chair slipcovers, in the end, will come down to what pleases you most.