More Thoughts on Choosing a Paint Color

Paint! My play-guest-room makeover is in full swing. I've been working on painting the moldings this week. Painting the trim is like giving the walls a French Manicure. I love it even more when the walls have the right color. Which, this time around, I think I do!

During my Master Bedroom Makeover series, I confessed to you my inability to choose paint color, and showed you my new "cheat sheet" of sorts-- a Pottery Barn paint palette.

Pottery Barn doesn't have the corner on the market on paint, either. In the last week or so, I've read some shout-outs on Restoration Hardware's more muted and limited palette, which also looks absolutely lovely. For more on those, see these fresh and fabulous posts:

Favorite Paint Colors by DebbieDoos Blogging and Blabbing

What a Pain(t) by A Soft Place to Land

I've done a lot of painting in the last three homes I've lived in. Lots. I'm still not a color expert. But I'm learning some principles and getting better each time I choose.

One thing I've come to understand that is critical is this: If your home is like mine, then you do not have a lot of natural (sun-only) light coming into your home. Sure, you've got windows, perhaps even wide open windows, but very few people are blessed enough to have a room that is mostly windows.

image

 This is going to do two things to your paint colors:
1. The colors are going to look yellower than on the card.

2. The colors are going to look darker than on the card.

Now, let me unpack these briefly. By yellower, I don't mean every color will look like yellow. Of course not. But your browns that look like cafe au lait in the Home Depot lights may look a little more like orange sherbet on your walls. This the nature of incandescent lighting. Or, even if you have the greener CFL bulbs in your home like I do, you are still going to get a bit of a yellowish cast.


Ain't nothing like the good old sun.

Photographers deal with this phenomenon all of the time. It's called color temperature. Different kinds of light create a warm (yellowish) or cool (bluish) cast on thing. And most indoor lighting is the former--warm, yellowish light. Our brains (and our cameras) adjust for this most of the time--for instance we see an object such as a blue plate under an incandescent light, and although under the light it appears a little greenish, we know it is blue, so our brains tell us we're seeing blue. Digital cameras adjust for this phenomenon automatically, and when they don't do as well we have lovely photo editing programs that can help us with this. (if you are a Picasa3 user, you can see this under "auto color" or "color temperature").

Even though my brain is supposed to be compensating, I find that when I have a color covering a big wall, and I live with it for a while...my brain stops filtering and I start seeing yellow. This is especially apparent with the beige, neutral, and golden tones on my walls. 

Take, for instance, the play-guest-room I'm in the process of painting. The color, according to Benjamin Moore's Website, should look like this:

image via Benjamin Moore

Here is that same color in the Pottery Barn catalog. (And, notice how PB homes have all of those beeeautiful windows?) Even still, it looks a little warmer here than it does above.

image via Pottery Barn

And here it is in my little playroom, with as much natural light as I can get into the room.

Here it is again, with much less natural light, and the overheads on.

Now your monitor might be different from mine, and again, my camera is adjusting for the light a bit. If anything, though, it should be making the second picture less yellow because it's compensating. Notice how much darker the second color seems, in addition to having more yellow tones. Artificial lights just aren't as bright as the sun!

So, is yellower, or darker, bad? Not necessarily. It depends what you're going for. I for one disagree with the popular adage that a dark paint color makes a room look smaller. My master bedroom looks every bit as much the same square footage to me as before I painted it a rich, medium blue.

Smaller? No. But it does look cozier. And that is the look I wanted for my bedroom.

So for all of you with typical homes with a moderate number of windows, just be aware of the yellow & dark principles. If you're not certain about what to choose, err on the side of slightly cooler (more blue) and lighter (farther up on the paint card). I think you will be glad that you did.

Oh, and, do get those $3.99 paint samples. Then you can see for yourself how the color looks in your home's conditions. Worth. Every. Penny. I'll tell you sometime about my living room adventure. Let's just say I learned this one the hard way. ;)