It's Project Month at Apartment Therapy, and what better opportunity to kick myself in the pants and try to finish something I've been working on for a year and a half…

Help me to understand this: as per last week's New York Times Style section, perfectionism in interiors equals minimalism, and without stating it outright, therefore somehow also equals all white interiors. How can that be?

I have something here that I've been saving for a rainy day, which it is, and I think this is also the first time in quite a while that I've used one of the new paints from Martha Stewart.

For years and years I've sought out on my winter hiatus a set of quintessentially Mexican colors in lovely Puerto Vallarta: Bougainvillea Pink, Margarita Green, Maize. This year I found myself drawn to something else entirely--the play of light and what defines colorful.

At last, it's January, which means that everything old is new again; and that it's time to look ahead to what trend-spotters are calling the ones-to-beat this year in color forecasting. Perhaps we'll forecast a few of our own.

I thought I'd kick off the New Year with this — a project I completed a year ago and just recently photographed. Here's what happens when someone lobs me the keys and says, "Ok kid, go nuts".

I recently bumped into this project a year plus after I finished it, and was reacquainted with a question I had back then--would blue and orange wind up looking like a Holiday Inn?

My final project of the outdoor painting season was this — a trompe-l'oeil balustrade in grisaille. The client wanted something to dress up this small deck on a post-war building and indeed it makes it seem like an additional room when you look at it from inside.

Fine Paints of Europe just announced the release of its new Guggenheim Color Collections and just when one wonders if the world has room for yet another paint product or palette on crowded store racks, the answer seems to be: why didn't anyone think of this before?

I have an addendum to last week's Color Therapy post, flatteringly titled by my editors as Gorgeous Grays. That was a painted stripe on the floor; why not try the same thing on the wall?