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LOCAL: 703-504-2000
FAX: 703-550-3755
EMAIL: contact@bluedoorpainters.com
Hear From Our Customers
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“They were very polite and professional. They took care around the house and appeared to take pride in their work. They cleaned-up after the first day and left the yard free of any ladders/tools/etc. The painting job was done very nicely. No drips or runs. They took care to match the color of our front [...]
Manassas, VA
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Decorating High Rise Condominiums
Blue Door Painters did the wallpapering you see above inside of a condominium in Crystal City. The formerly dark-yellow room now looks MUCH bigger with these light reflecting colors.
Liberate your Arlington, VA condo with Outside-the-Box Interior Design
A homeowner out in the suburbs, or a farmer with a cute farmhouse in the hills, has a lot of options when it comes to remodeling. You can bash a wall out and put up an addition. You can raise the roof, finish the basement, add or cover windows. You can change your roof shingles and siding, you can put up a deck, you can landscape. All of these changes will transform the mood and the practical potential of your living space.
In Northern Virginia, however, a lot of us live in condominiums. Arlington County hosts some of the most affluent neighborhoods in the entire country, and the region’s popularity might account for its being voted by October 2008′s Business Week as the ‘Safest City to Weather a Recession’. However, at the current population density of Virginia’s smallest county, many of its citizens don’t have the luxury of a whole lot of extra space, and are proud to secure themselves a simple high-rise condominium. Neighborhoods like Rosslyn, Crystal City, Ballston, Courthouse, and Clarendon all contain a significant population dwelling in condos. There are a lot of perks to urban condo living; convenience, liberation from driving, utility efficiency, groundskeeping – but if there is something about your space that you don’t find satisfying, it is a whole lot harder to change it when you are confined to a small, box-shaped indoor area.
Fortunately, both architects and interior designers have expended years of creativity and expertise to address that very problem: how to make the most out of small spaces? The clever little cubicles spread throughout the IKEA showrooms provide an example of the public’s need for small space solutions. Owning a condo, while it isn’t the same as owning a single-family home complete with deck, driveway, and backyard, should still empower the homeowner to make the changes necessary to make a condo into a dream home.
The first step to creative condo remodeling is to clear your mind about what is actually there (square living room, narrow hallway, two boxy bedrooms), and sit down and think about what you want. Big, luxurious bathroom? Earthy hunting cabin? Airy, upscale balcony with a view and a cocktail bar? Good! No matter how ridiculous you think it might seem given the spatial reality of your Northern Virginia condo, it is very important to know what you want.
Next, you need to consider your long-term plans. Is this condo going to be your home, or is it more like a way station, an investment you made in the (hopefully improving) DC real estate market? If you intend your condo for resale in the near future, your design goals will be different than they would be for your long-term home. When condos are sold, they need to be staged in a certain way to make them appeal to the widest possible audience. Decorating a home for staging requires creating an ambience that is as impersonal as possible, so that potential buyers see themselves living there, not you. If you would like to come up with a design scheme that maximizes both your enjoyment of the space and its resale value, jot down both what you would like and what you think would create the widest possible appeal, and see if you can come up with a happy medium.
Finally, you need to come up with a design plan. There are two levels of remodeling that you can undertake in the process of transforming your space. The first is architectural. It may seem like a condo’s layout just is the way it is, but in most buildings you can actually alter the interior plan of the condo, changing the position of walls, doors, and sometimes even windows! If you want that great big bathroom, for example, you can take out part of the bedroom or walk-in closet adjacent and donate that square footage to the cause.
However, due to the limited area, every choice you make will inevitably involve sacrificing something else. This is where interior design comes in. With interior design, you can use clever techniques to create the feeling of what you want, without dramatically altering the floor plan.
Color, for example, can be used to contour a space, making it feel larger or smaller as the case may be. Put light colors in places you want to look bigger, and dark colors in places you want to stand out. If you want more light, consider lighting and mirrors, as an alternative to windows. If you want a hunting lodge, make a faux fireplace out of brick veneer with a little inset gas fire (these come in all sizes), mount a sturdy shelf over it, throw a bearskin on the floor, a gun on the shelf, and mount your favorite buck overtop. If you want a chic, upscale look, consider hip color combinations: gray, pale blue, bright orange, and chrome accessories, and maximize whatever balcony you do have.
Living in Northern Virginia is exciting and fulfilling, but living in a condo can bring about its own unique challenges. Be proactive in creating an interior that you really love. Blue Door Painters is here to help.
Architectural Exterior Accents in DC: Places to Put Your Color
Adding nicely painted shutters, an accented flower box or repainting your door are just a few ways to heighten your curb appeal in the DC area.
Blue Door Painters Discusses Parts of the House to Use for Accent Colors
An accent color is an essential aspect of any color scheme, and it is a critical element of establishing curb appeal. A color in your design scheme qualifies as an accent if you don’t use very much of it, and if you put it in a place that stands out in some ways from the rest of the architecture. A very well-tested design strategy involves using a color that is either unusually bright, or radically different from the rest of your scheme, as an edgy accent. Across the panorama of Washington, DC construction, there are five frequently found architectural features, visible from the road, that provide ideal spots to host an accent color. We’ve listed them, along with some suggestions for maximizing their effect, below.
1. Shutters. With urban roots in very traditional Georgian, Colonial, and Federal-style architecture, Washington DC and Northern Virginia have many buildings that pair plain brick or siding with shutters as the only adornment. While you need to be careful adding too much bold contrast in your shutters, since they actually cover a fair amount of visual surface area, playing with color in your shutters is an excellent way to manipulate your overall design without expending too much time or paint. If you have a window that stands out from the rest in any way, experiment with painting the shutters on that window only a more dramatic color to create the ‘eye-catching’ effect used by many realtors to help stage houses. Also remember that color can be used to contour the space: lighter shutters will make a window seem slightly larger than darker shutters. Have fun: the cool thing about shutters – and accents in general – is that they are easy to change. If you take a risk and don’t end up liking the effect, you can always paint over it!
2. Doors. Doors are a classic candidate for a bold accent color. First of all, they are centrally located, creating a natural visible focal point for the house as a whole. Second, they are symbolic: the entryway to a space is automatically assumed, on a subconscious level, to encapsulate its spirit. (This is why the doorways to many houses of worship are very ornate). Adding some energy in the door area in the form of a burst of bold but tasteful color shows viewers that the home is lively and engaging, not dull and listless.
3. Cornices. While most modern construction has a minimal amount of cornicing, many of the historic buildings in the city and its surrounding urban villages feature cornices added for both decorative and functional effect. The narrow horizontal lines provided by cornices often accentuate certain architectural features, and offer an ideal opportunity to add in a splash of color. If you do not have cornices, but want to take advantage of that horizontal accent style, you can look into creative alternatives like creating a stripe out of a single line of siding, or even painting your gutter!
4. Chimney. Many houses in DC have chimneys, primarily constructed out of brick. Sometimes they are located on one end of the house, and sometimes they come straight out of the roof, creating a little architectural crown. While you have to take special care when painting chimneys, both to ensure you use the right kind of paint to adhere to the masonry, and to make sure your paint job can withstand the added environmental stress of fireplace smoke, painting chimneys is an excellent way to add a splash of color. You can experiment with both painting the entire chimney, or painting individual bricks scattered evenly throughout. Just remember that visual balance is essential: strong color on one side of the house should be balanced in some way on the other, and strong color on the roof should be balanced by something (like a detail in the landscaping) lower down.
5. Planter Boxes. The good thing about planter boxes is: if you don’t have them, you can easily get them! Planter boxes are an easy way to alter the aesthetic of just about any design, and they are an excellent avenue for adding color. Living green is an excellent neutral: brightly colored planter boxes filled with blooming flowers or vivid foliage can brighten up almost any exterior, without looking gaudy.
Color Combo Special #3: Analogous Color Schemes
Analogous color schemes are taken from a 1/4 piece of the color wheel with varying hues, values and saturations.
Analogous color schemes provide a classic balance between variety and similarity that is both timeless and universally appealing. While monochromatic schemes might be the #1 most reliable color strategy for conservative purposes, analogous schemes are a good way to add a little bit of flavor without departing too far from the beaten path of easy-to-match colors.
How is an analogous color scheme developed? Using a near-identical technique to the monochromatic scheme, good analogous schemes are built upon the foundation of one initial color. Whether this first color is a personal favorite, or a pre-existing ‘given’ color in the architecture, it will be the color around which the rest of the color scheme pivots.
Working from there, you locate that color on the color wheel, and then take a look at its immediate neighbors. With blue, for example, green and purple are the immediate neighbors, and hues from the green and/or purple range could therefore be used in any combination to create an analogous color scheme. With a range of roughly 1/4 of the color wheel available, you are free to pick and choose the hues, values, and saturations that you find the most appealing. While you need to be aware of how much contrast you are adding to your composition by varying the value and saturation (i.e., using bright colors, versus pastels, versus dull earth tones), you can be pretty confident that most combinations you come up with, provided they are confined to that tight segment of the color wheel, will be pleasing and unlikely to clash.
One of the benefits to analogous color schemes is that it can offer a great degree of internal variation while maintaining a constant mood, tone, or psychological ‘temperature’. A ‘warm-toned’ analogous scheme can have deep oranges, dull reds, and bright yellows – each underscoring the warmth of the composition in a distinct way. A ‘cool-toned’ analogous scheme, alternatively, might employ blues, greens, and violets with the opposite psychological effect, but an equal degree of internal consistency.
The analogous color scheme is the first color strategy that we’ve discussed so far that allows for some creative variation, putting the final choice to your discretion. Using your natural aesthetic instincts is a good way to choose which specific color alignments really click, and which are discordant. Make sure to envision the colors in the proper proportions, and covering a large surface area, when you are making the final decision. Remember, there is no harm in purchasing a few quarts of paint and coloring in a sample area – sometimes you can be very surprised by how a color looks when spread out over a large surface!
If the choices involved in crafting an analogous color scheme are too much for you, you might want to consider looking into a monochromatic scheme, or turning to our complimentary color consultation service for support. If, on the other hand, you like the challenge and the creative potential involved in the analogous scheme, and you’d like to learn some techniques that allow for even more creativity, stay tuned for our next Color Combo feature: the Complementary Color Scheme!
Paint in the City: Early Washington DC Architecture
Washington D.C. has a stark, yet beautiful and historical architecture. Preserving it can be a major task.
A brief history of early Washington, DC architecture, and discussion of how it affects modern remodeling.
Washington, DC is an unusual city.
Most urban centers develop for practical reasons, which can be boiled down to physical terrain: proximity to a port, easy defensibility, accessibility to a natural resource, etc. From the practical use of the land, urban growth is organic. But Washington, DC is an exception. While the conjunction of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers, just downstream of the fall line, (and therefore the farthest upstream port for oceangoing boats), makes it a natural location for an urban center, neither of the two cities that developed naturally in that location were Washington, DC. Instead, they were Georgetown and Alexandria. Located across the river and slightly offset from each other, Georgetown and Alexandria thrived quietly until 1791. Driven by the need of a young, bickering nation, and by the desire of President George Washington to keep everything close to his Mount Vernon estate, Washington DC was forcefully superimposed atop the two natural port towns. The result is a city whose growth, even at the core, started off strictly choreographed rather than organic.
The modern-day result is a series of historic neighborhoods with architecture that bears the mark of many years of political and symbolic pressure, as well as practical and aesthetic concerns.
Most of the earliest pre-DC buildings in Georgetown are now gone, but some of the initial planned developments remain. George Washington, as the closest thing our country has ever had to a king, had a huge degree of influence on the architecture of the city. He dictated that residential development in the District of Columbia be in the form of long, rectangular row houses with contiguous fronts. The row houses were to be between 35-40 feet tall, built of brick and stone, and parallel to the streets. Many of these historic row houses – along with more modern replacements that stay faithful to the classic style – can still be found from Georgetown to Capitol Hill. Their relatively narrow street-fronts and masonry construction offer a unique challenge in exterior design. Creatively playing off of the neighbors’ decor is important in settings where houses are clustered so closely. Too much contrast will make a particular unit look tacky, while a lack of contrast makes a street look dull and monotonous. Typically, each street in historic Washington, DC has developed its own aesthetic “tone” (earth tones, vibrant pastels, natural masonry, etc) derived from the hue, chroma, and value typical of the palette for that street. So it is important to pay attention to the neighbors, and to the ambience of the street as a whole, when deciding on a design scheme.
Farther out in the city, beyond the dictates of the president’s aesthetic (i.e., on the far side of Florida Avenue), single family homes with larger lots were developed to house wealthy dignitaries with business in the city. These historical homes attempted to capture a piece of the greenery that used to make the DC area a popular hunting and outdoor exploration area, while remaining publicly prominent and convenient to the seat of political business. Most of these homes, as well as most of the public buildings, adhere to conservative Greek Revival / Federal style, indicative of the strong builder tradition in DC’s early years. Typically paired with a muted, conservative color palette, Greek Revival buildings can be painted in historical colors (usually involving low-chroma terra-cotta, gray, beige, steel blue, and sage green) to retain that stately early Federal look. Many paint companies, including Sherwin-Williams and Banjamin Moore, have a line of historical paint colors that mimic the colors popular (and possible) 200 years ago, but use modern paint technology to ensure improved coverage and durability.
Preserving our city’s national heritage is an important task, and one that every designer, developer, and contractor should be aware of. Relatively young compared to many European cities, Washington, DC is nevertheless reaching an age where its historical buildings need care, attention, and preservation so that the city can prepare for the exciting new modern age while retaining the signature of its roots.
Color Combo Special #2: Monochromatic Schemes
This is an example of a very natural monochromatic color scheme. It's warm and inviting, isn't it?
Monochromatic schemes are probably the easiest way to “get it right” when it comes to color combinations. Practical for staging houses and other times when a tried-and-true method to create a simple, pleasing decor is what you want, monochromatic combinations follow a simple formula that gives you nearly guaranteed success.
That formula? Just pick one color. It could be your favorite color, the color that creates the mood you’re trying to inspire, or the color that will appeal to the widest possible audience. For staging purposes, it is usually good to go with a light-toned, space-creating neutral like white, cream, or beige. For personal decoration purposes, think of a color that you will really enjoy over a long span of time, and in many different moods.
Once you’ve picked your color, you get to do the fun part. Without varying the core color, or hue, in color classification lingo, create several different shades of that color by varying the value (lightness or darkness), and the chroma (brightness or dullness). You can start with a buttery cream, for example, and mix in black to create a darker umber color for one of the accent colors, and then turn up the intensity to create a bold, warm mustard yellow for another. As long as you stay within the same hue (or an extremely tight range), you can play with the value and the chroma almost indefinitely, and you will still end up with a pleasing color combination. The variation created by the shading will give your composition texture, but your colors are very unlikely to ever clash.
And there is actually a surprising range of effects you can create using a monochromatic scheme. For example, a blue-based scheme that starts with a main color of bright cornflower blue, and accents it with a strong navy and a shocking bright-sky color, is going to make a much bolder statement than a dull blue-gray that is accented with a paler blue-gray and some slate-colored trim, even though in both cases you have essentially an all-blue room.
Remember to take into account the other objects in your composition that will provide colors that you might not have predicted: your rugs, furniture, and other decorations in your interior, or your bricks, deck, patio, roof, and landscaping in your exterior. If it becomes too difficult to keep everything exactly the same color, you might want to look into analogous color schemes as a method of providing more variety, which will be discussed in the next installment. Stay tuned!
Color Combo Special #1: Monotonal Schemes
This is very close to monotonal, but not quite there. Still, it's quite a bold color scheme.
Sometimes, extreme conservatism can turn into daring.
As a general rule of thumb for design, the more colors you use in a decoration scheme, the bolder or “louder” that design becomes. And the bolder it gets, the more clever you need to be to keep all the wild colors you choose from clashing with each other. Also, the more “personal” the scheme becomes – meaning that its effect is unique, impressive, and creative, but may appeal to a smaller set of viewers than a more conservative collection of colors (for this reason, bold color schemes are not usually recommended for staging houses). For those who want to take the easy road with their design scheme, however, fewer – and more neutral – colors are what the doctor usually orders.
Usually. True monotonal color schemes are the exception that proves the rule. A “monotonal” color scheme is one in which only one color is used. Literally, only one color. For interiors, that would be the same color for the walls, ceilings, furniture, rug, flooring material, etc. For exteriors, that would be the same color for the siding, brick, doors, window trim, chimneys, etc. And where the use of just a few neutral colors with little variation around the color wheel can create a mellow, conservative composition, the use of literally one shade of one color on everything looks daring and wild – and most of the time, rather overwhelming.
That’s because you will almost never find a scene in nature composed of only one color. When you look closely at a stream bed full of seemingly “gray” pebbles, you’ll find that upon closer inspection, the rocks are a veritable crayon box of different hues; lights and darks, reds and blues, stripes and speckles. To come upon a scene where there is only one color, no matter how closely you inspect the details, is to come upon a scene that shows off humanity’s control over our environment in a rather startling manner.
Such aggressive monotonality has been a hallmark of certain edgy modern styles. An all-white living room or an all-red dining room creates a living space that really attracts a lot of notice, and garners a certain amount of respect in some social circles for the bold statement that it makes. With only one color, the variety of textures and light sources in a space get thrown into high relief, creating a fascinating visual effect. In some cases, a monotonal color scheme can be made even more vivid by breaking the strict adherence to one color only by adding a bright, splashy accent color.
However, for many of us, a monotonal color scheme does not provide for a very relaxing living space. The same field of uniform color that is exciting and edgy in a club or restaurant can quickly become grating and irritating when you have to look at it day in and day out. When you start at the far edge of uniformity, allowing some variety into your color scheme will actually make it more relaxing, less conspicuous, and more conservative. Taking that first step into variety brings you out of the monotonal color scheme and into the monochromatic scheme, which we will discuss in our next installment in this series. Stay tuned . . .
How Much Color Do You Want in an Interior?
This amazing color wheel was created by Moses Harris (1731-1785)
Tips from expert color consultants on interior design in the Washington, DC area
There are six basic strategies for using the color wheel to develop harmonious color palettes. We’ve listed them below, in order from the most conservative to the most daring. All you need is a basic subtractive color wheel (3 primary colors, 3 secondary colors, and 3 tertiary colors), and you are ready to get started trying out combinations. When deciding which strategy to use, you will need to consider what kind of visual and emotional impact you want your space to have.
SIX COLOR PICKING STRATEGIES
- Monotonal: Take one small slice of the wheel, and pick three our four shades that are both close together, and similar in value (light vs dark) and chroma (bright vs dull), and you have a monotonal color scheme. Monotonal color schemes are ideal for settings where you want the decor to fade into the background, perhaps as a setting for brightly colored art or furniture. If you intend to use monotonal furnishings and decorations as well, you should be careful that the color concentration doesn’t become overwhelming.
- Monochromatic: Monochromatic color schemes involve a similarly small slice of the color wheel (i.e., all blue, or all yellow) – but cast the net wider to include a variety of values and chromes. So a monochromatic blue scheme, for example, might include a pastel baby blue, a grayish slate-blue, a deep navy, and a bright cornflower blue for accents. The strength of monochromatic schemes is that they usually do come out looking harmonious, and they can maintain a consistent mood, but they allow for enough contrast to give the decor some texture.
- Analogous: For an analogous color scheme, you get to carve out a slightly larger slice of the wheel, collecting several base hues clustered on the same side. Blue and green, for example, or blue, green, and violet, could be combined to create an analogous color scheme. Analogous color schemes provide for a greater variety, while still maintaining a constant color ‘temperature’ (meaning the psychological impression of temperature, not the actual physical temperature) and offering a good chance of coming out harmonious.
- Complementary: Moving into the more daring color combinations; complementary color schemes involve jumping across the wheel. First you pick a favorite color, and then you jump across the wheel and also collect its opposite. The contrast you get from complementary color schemes is vivid, but they tend to look good together because colors that are directly opposite each other on the wheel develop good aesthetic balance.
- Split-Complementary/Double-Complementary: A more sophisticated strategy involves splitting each hue in a complementary color scheme into two. Each pair of hues should be equally offset from the original central hue, and the variation should be slight, so that the color wheel balance is still achieved. You can balance one color against one pair, or create two pairs opposite each other on the wheel. Complementary color schemes offer a high degree of intricacy, and can create a pleasant combination, but you need to take care at this level of complexity that your colors do not start to clash.
- Triad/Tetrad: Finally, you can usually create a harmonious scheme using the triad or tetrad color picking strategy. For this technique, you pick three colors that are evenly distributed around the wheel (like red, yellow, and blue, for example) – or four colors that are evenly distributed. Once you pick the colors, you can play with the value and chroma to create a complex arrangement that is pleasing to the eye.
How Are Colors Classified?
A few examples of changes in hue.
Artists and poets have fallen in love with color for as long as there has been human culture, and there are a million beautiful color names that have been invented to describe the rich palettes that fill our world. However, in an attempt to standardize a language of color for optimal communication, and to bring color analysis into the realm of science, several color classification systems have been developed. The Munsell Color System, created by Albert H. Munsell in the early 1900s, is an example of a good, comprehensive classification system for organizing colors and analyzing the relationships between them.
Albert Munsell observed that the colors we see actually have three different dimensions, which vary independently of each other. Two of these dimensions come from the two types of photoreceptive cells in our eyes, and the third is a combination of the two working together.
The Three Characteristics of Any Color
1. Hue – the particular wavelength in the rainbow or color wheel (detected by the cones in the eye)
2. Value – the lightness or darkness of the color, measured by the amount of black and white mixed in (detected by the rods in the eye)
3. Chroma (Sometimes called “intensity” or “saturation”) – the degree of pure color versus neutral tones (black/white/gray) in the mixture (detected by the rods and the cones together)
When you discuss color for the purposes of architectural decorating, all three of these characteristics are important, and all of them have a distinct impact on the color scheme that they create. The hue, for example, determines the warmth or coolness of the color, and also plays a role in its psychological impact (we will discuss the basic psychological impact of all of the basic rainbow colors in another installment). The value determines how much light the color reflects, which plays a role in “color contouring“, or using color to affect the perceived dimensions of a space. Lighter colors make an area look lighter and more spacious, while darker colors make an area look heavier and more enclosed. Finally, the chroma of a color plays a strong role in how aggressively the color grabs your attention. If you want your decor to fade into the background, you want to use colors of a lower chroma than if you want your decor to attract attention.
When deciding on a color scheme, consider the hue, value, and chroma of all of your colors carefully, and watch how you mix and match – there is an infinite variety of beautiful color schemes out there.
What Is Color?
Discussion of Color Relevant to Painting and Refinishing in the Washington, DC Area
What, exactly, is color? It is such a pervasive aspect of our lives that the question almost sounds absurd. Color is color, and there isn’t anything else to it. However, a deeper understanding of the physics and biology that create our experience of color can shed light on some of the intricacies of picking color for an interior or exterior painting project.
Human perception of color results from sensitive tissues in our eyes registering visible light of differing wavelengths and intensities. Red light has the longest wavelength, shrinking as we proceed down the rainbow all the way to violet light, which has the shortest wavelength of the visible range. Having visual sensitivity to this specific range of the electromagnetic spectrum (ie, being able to see in color) has been evolutionarily critical for human beings, because color is such a helpful cue in navigating our environment. Important objects in our environment – like plants, water, and other animals – are more easily identified by their characteristic colors.
The path from a beam of light to our mental perception of color, however, has multiple steps involved. First, light comes into our eye, both directly from a light source (such as when you look straight at a neon light), and also reflected off of the objects around us. When reflected off of the objects in our environment, that light gives us critical information about our surroundings. To formulate our visual field, and help us navigate, our eyes collect two kinds of information; the color’s value and the color’s hue, and there is a specialized type of photoreceptive cell in our retina (the area on the back of the eyeball that receives light) for each.
First, the rods in our retina collect information about how much (or little) light is being reflected off of each surface, we see giving us a visual field full of bright spots and shadows. The amount of reflected light coming off of an object is sometimes called its color “value”, and it can be depicted on a grayscale. Perceiving color values in our environment is critical for depth perception; our brain analyzes the lights and darks to figure out what is in the foreground, what is in the background, and what direction the light is coming from.
Unless you are black-white color blind, there is also a second set of photoreceptive cells in your retina, called the cones, which are oblivious to the amount of light coming in, but instead react to the wavelength, “color”, or “hue”, of that light. In perceiving wavelength, the cones offer your brain a whole new set of inputs with which to make sense of the visual field. While seeing in black and white is sufficient to detect depth, motion, and all of the fundamental attributes necessary to go about your daily life without bumping into things, color gives you critical information about the state of the objects in the world. A leaf’s color, for example, can tell you if it is alive or dead; a fruit’s if it is green or ripe, an insect’s if it is poisonous or harmless, the sky’s if it is going to stay fair or rain. In nature, many creatures use color as a language to communicate across species lines: the flower encourages insects to pollinate using bright colors, while the bright red frog warns predators that it is poisonous. Perception of hue also lends a finer degree of detail to our sense of space and light; being able to tell that a shadow has a bluish tinge gives us a subtly different understanding than simply sensing how dark it is; perhaps the sun is setting, and the extra orange in the light is giving the shadow its complimentary tinge.
Finally, the information collected from the rods and cones in the eye has to be sent up to the brain in order to turn into a perception. It is here that the brain taps into all the personal associations that you have formed with that particular color, and forms a unique experience of that color for you. So as you can see, color perception is a complicated process, and one that allows for a wide variety of color perception between individuals.
Can I Paint My Bedroom the Color the Sky Is Right Now?
Discussion of Design, Color Matching, and Spectrophotometry from a Northern Virginia Painting Contractor
Color is an amazing, and elusive, element of life. Our vision doesn’t necessarily depend on it, and in some ways the information it brings us is superficial: it doesn’t tell us about more than the surface of an object. Yet a world without color is undeniably lacking something, and even people who are relatively ambivalent about color are affected by it.
So the process of choosing the colors that you are going to paint your interior – essentially, the colors that you are going to live among – is one that merits serious consideration. There is much to say about interior design and color matching; how to come up with a color scheme from scratch, how to predict how your colors will look when applied to a large architectural surface, etc. But here we are going to focus on the art and technology of what to do when you start your project already knowing what colors you want.
There are three steps to getting your paint to turn out the perfect color. The first step is to get a physical color sample. The next step is to adjust that color sample so that it is perfectly suited for its intended project. The final step is to use a spectrophotometer to create paint that will turn out that color.
Steps one and two provide the greatest challenge if you are trying to match a color from a natural landscape (i.e., the “color the sky is right now”). Visual artists are well aware that the play of light and color in a natural landscape involves a huge array of hues, tones, and contrast, that can be depicted a variety of ways. The blue of a sky in nature is luminescent – it is actually emitting light – and so translating it into an opaque color involves a substantial challenge. It is also subtly and infinitely variable, so using one paint color to mimic it will likely fall flat. In landscape paintings, artists use startling color juxtapositions – like throwing yellow into a blue sky – to achieve the desired results – but in interior design you have to achieve the effect you want a lot more simply.
So when you pick your color, you want to have your whole composition in mind, and you also want to consider, as always with picking architectural paint colors, how intense or overwhelming the colors will look if applied to large surfaces. With colors from nature, this might take some adjustment. Take a picture of the sky, get the photo printed, and then put it up on the wall and imagine how it will look when painted over the whole surface and when put together with your trim, accent, and furniture colors. Trust your instincts: it may actually be a few shades lighter or grayer that you are truly looking for.
Next, you need to bring your color sample – along with any adjustments you might want to make to it – into a paint store. Walk past the showroom area, past the hardware store, and go up to the service counter in the back. Somewhere near the service counter, there should be a computer plugged into a small, shoebox-sized machine. (Hopefully, there will also be a person back there who knows how to operate it!). The machine is called a spectrophotometer, and what it does is analyze the color of whatever physical sample you submit to it and come up with a pigment formula for mixing that paint color. The paint store employee can then take that code and plug it into their paint mixer, creating a bucket of paint in that color.
The spectrophotometer works by bouncing white light off of your sample and onto a light-sensitive detector, which analyzes the spectrum of reflected light and sends that information to the computer. This method is roughly 90% effective; sometimes the color will be slightly off. This is especially true when working from photos or magazines, which sometimes allow light through or have colors behind that bleed, when working with an extremely small sample (you want it to be at least the size of a quarter), or working with metallic colors. So it is important to check your paint when you are finished to make sure you’ve come up with the right color. Also, if you want to have the color be several shades lighter, darker, grayer, etc., than your sample, tell the store clerk before the paint gets mixed. It is a wise idea to initially mix a small amount of paint, which you can take home and test on your surface, before committing to the full amount.
