By Mike Tattersall

Adding color accents to your kitchen can be challenging with today's popular open area floor plans where your kitchen, living room, and dining room are all open to one another and visible. Even if your home is not arranged in this manner, marrying colors is still your best friend. Take a look around these three main living spaces and find a color that is not prevalent but that you would like to bring out with accents. Most often you can find this color embedded in throw pillows, sofa, draperies, or a tablecloth just to name a few. Lacking that, make a list of the prevalent color you currently have throughout these rooms, look up a color wheel on the Internet, and nine times out of 10 the color directly opposite of your prevalent color on the wheel will be a great accent choice. Here's how to add accents to your kitchen.

Now, let's accent your kitchen with color. The most obvious way to accent is through kitchen towels, kitchen drapes, canisters, and pottery items in your chosen accent color. However, we're going to take it one step further using ceramic tiles. Ceramic tiles can be found at most home improvement centers and flooring outlets. You will be choosing three 8”x8” tiles in a neutral color.

You will also need:

  • Acrylic paint (small tube or bottle) in your chosen accent color
  • A stencil (pre-made from the craft store or printed from the I-net and cut out by you)
  • A sponge dabber (about 1” in diameter)
  • A can of polyurethane clear spray
  • 3 picture hangers (ridged works well)
  • Adhesive (JB Weld type works well)

Make sure your tile has been thoroughly cleaned and is dry before you begin. Lay your tile on a flat surface on top of a drop cloth or piece of plastic. Lay your stencil over the tile and tape the sides down if necessary to keep it from sliding around. Next pour some of the paint into a non-porous bowl. Tap your dabber into the paint and begin to fill in the stencil cutout area. Once you have filled in the area with your accent color, let it dry completely. As a finishing touch, go along the outer edges of the tile with a small artist brush in the same accent color. Let dry. Spray the entire tile (front and sides) with clear polyurethane. Let dry.

Once it is completely dry, turn the tile over and affix the hanger. Come down from the top of the tile about 3/4” and glue the ridged picture hanger to the back of the tile following the adhesive compound's instructions. Move on to your next tile while the first is drying.

Hanging the finished tiles in groups of three creates a wonderfully unique, personalized, and colorful accent to your kitchen.