Showcase Your Creative Flair – The 2026 Resene Total Colour Awards

Entries now closed.  If you have any queries, please email us at colourwards@resene.co.nz. Check back to see when the 2026/27 competition opens.

The Resene Total Colour Awards celebrate the bold, the innovative, and the beautiful use of colour in design. Whether your project is residential, commercial, interior, exterior, big, small, built, or conceptual – if colour plays a starring role, we want to see it.

With over NZ $15,000 in prizes up for grabs, including NZ $1,000 for each category winner and NZ $2,500 for the prestigious Resene Total Colour Nightingale Award, it's more than just an accolade – it's an opportunity for your work to gain national recognition.

Winners will receive:

• A Resene Total Colour Award sculpture
• Promotion across Resene's digital, print, and social media platforms throughout the year
• Automatic entry into the Colour Master Nightingale Award the best of the best award selected from each category winners (excluding the Lifetime Achievement award).

Categories include:

Commercial includes commercial, corporate rebranding, industrial, government sector.

About the Resene Total Colour Awards

Resene has a long history of colour with colours like Resene Spanish White and Resene Pearl Lusta created over three decades ago still continuing to be top choices for decorators today. In 1969 Resene set up a new system of colour, the British Standard Specification colour range which provided a range of strong colours at a time when the market was used to pastel colours. And more recently, in keeping with Resene's focus on sustainable innovations, Resene has developed its own range of non VOC (volatile organic compound) tinters to enable all Resene decorative paints to be tinted without unwanted VOCs.

With thousands of Resene colours available, there's no point having all these colours if they aren't being used, which led to the creation of the Resene Total Colour Awards in 2010 to celebrate and encourage creative use of colour. It has run annually since then.