At the end of the month long January Cure, I decided to invite past House Tour participant Mark Wynsma over to socialize, share some macarons, meet my Frenchie and discuss design. His home is fantastic with his brave DIYs, his eclectic style, and of course his bold and (very) successful use of color.
Many of my friends have mentioned his tour to me as their inspiration for painting their homes in bold hues, and now that I am looking to paint my home (currently all white), I naturally asked him for his thoughts. I knew that he had chosen his colors without so much as painting sample swatches - he made his choices with a sophistication and impressive innate understanding of color. He very generously offered to take a trip to the paint store to share his knowledge and give some tips on how to choose colors that are right for you.
Here is what I learned by talking to Mark:
Getting Started:
If you have decided to paint your home but are unsure of what type of color(s) you want to use, begin with a reference point. Think of a photograph you like, a piece of artwork, the colors in your wardrobe, and what colors you already have in your home. Think about what colors you are naturally drawn to. This will help you establish where you want to begin.
Look for inspiration everywhere. What is the view like from your windows? If you have a tree that you love, draw your eye there by choosing a bold color on that wall, in either a similar color or a contrasting color. Don't be afraid to be bold.
Take note of other types of desigsn: stripes or lines tell the eye where to go when looking at a magazine cover, photograph or artwork — they can do the same in a room. To draw the eye up in a small room, contrasting vertical stripes can do the trick.
Three Rules To Keep in Mind:
• More than one color in a room can look great, but if you go in that direction, keep it to three colors maximum. If you are going with two bold colors, the third should be a neutral to give your eye a break.
• When choosing your colors start by choosing your boldest color, and then choose the others with the first color in mind.
• Don't be scared! Paint is not permanent and you can always change it.
Putting it All Together:
Below are some sample combinations to get you started. Some show more than three colors, with the idea being that there are several versions that would work equally well. There is never one right answer to a design question.
If you are looking to add just a light wash of color and want a light neutral, grey tends to look better than beige. There are more variations or tones to choose from in the grey family than in beige. If you choose a grey, don't limit yourself to the all grey sample cards — many color cards have a grey variation of the color. It might be that the best grey for you is on the far end of the purple cards.
You can keep your walls neutral and also have a darker color. Neutrals are not just whites, greys and beiges. They also include: black, brown, olive and blue. If blue doesn't sound like a neutral to you, think about how blue denim goes with nearly anything.
If you would like to add yellow to your space as the main color, try balancing it out with something neutral. When choosing a white to go with yellow, keep a check on how much yellow is in the in white you choose. You don't want a white with yellow in it or the reflection from the yellow wall onto the white wall will make it appear dingy.
If choosing a bold color that has a vintage feel, add grey as a light neutral instead of beige. It will look more modern.
If you prefer to leave out white but want yellow, try pairing it with a grey, but as with white, choose a base grey carefully. It will also appear dingy next to a yellow if it has yellow in it. Opt for a blue grey rather than yellow grey. In the above, the grey would go with either of the yellow hues shown below it (not both).
Something to keep in mind if looking to add a brown is that browns often have red in them. Remember that warmer browns reflect light better. If you choose to go with a brown, think about using it on the wall by a window so light will reflect from the lighter wall.
Pink doesn't have to be too saccharine. Make it sophisticated by using it in tandem with a dark color. A rich jewel tone or a deep grey can make it feel more grown up. Don't discount pink — it adds a warm complementary tone to the lighting in the room. Try to avoid pinks with too much red in them. To keep your pink from looking like bubble gum, go for a slightly orange undertone.
Pairing warm colors with purple brings out purple's natural warmth. For a modern look add a grey color to the mix.
If you want to go with a red, think about the base color. Blue red is more industrial, while orange reds are warmer and easier to work with. If you are going with two bright colors of equal dominance, then paint a smaller amount of one of the brights, not two big walls.
Don't be afraid of using two greens (or any two shades of the same color) in the same room. Just watch the base white to make sure it has same base as the two colors.
While color is a very personal choice with many factors to think about, don't be afraid to go with your instincts. Mark's current favorite combination references nature and combines an ocean blue with green and orange. A bold combination, but one that I imagine he would make look fabulous in his home.
Thanks, Mark!
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(Images: Liana Walker)
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I'd love to see photos of his rooms!
Mark certainly has a talent for color! I love gray walls and once painted my office a lovely gray. However, I soon found myself avoiding working in there; the gray had a dampening effect on my energy and cheer. I painted again, this time a toasty yellow -- very cheerful, and the energy for office work returned. It is important to appreciate the mood effects of color and be sensitive to one's own responses to it. Such responses may lie at an unconscious level, and require an educational effort to discern. Painting walls the wrong color for yourself can be educational!
@rosemariek: His home is great! If you click the link associated with his name at the beginning or end of this article, it will direct you to his house tour!
Mark, I'd be interested to know what you think the undertone of Benjamin Moore's famous "Cloud White" is. All of the trim and ceilings in my 1908 Vancouver home are painted this colour to keep it warm, not stark, on cloudy days. Would you consider this to be a yellow undertone?
Thanks!
Thank you. A very prescient and timely post...of course, if you're on this site, you're probably painting or thinking about painting 'most all the time ;]
The colour combinations look great, but I am SO scared of colour, nothing will make me paint my white walls!
I disagree with painting walls green. It is a very unflattering color and in a poorly lit room will make everyone look seasick.
Love to see my AT handle's colors represented together in the last photo, as they should be. :)
It is so true that you have to appreciate the mood of a color and what it means for you. I also painted my office gray - but for me, that's perfect, because that sense of tranquility is exactly what I need to settle into my work. My front rooms (living and dining) are both a warm yellow, because that's where that energy needs to be; my bedroom is a very soft greenish blue (Benjamin Moore's "Glass Slipper") because that helps me settle down to rest. I think mood is really the number-one element that makes or breaks a color choice - and that is going to vary from person to person, always. So paying attention not just to the colors you love, but the WAY you love them, how you feel when you're surrounded by them, is so important.
Mark has a very sophisticated eye. This is a great assemblage of vintage colors.
One tip I didn't see and was probably taken for granted: Always, always make your final color selection in your home and not in the paint store. The lighting and sunlight in your home cam make colors look very different. This is called "metamerism".
Bookmarked. I've been aching to apply some color to the Modtomic Ranch but am not the go to guy for paint pickins. I just can't picture the end result. Nice to have some expert help.
I'd like to see a discussion of location as an element in room color selection. These colors in a sunny room in Tucson or Darwin would not look the same (or, perhaps, as good) as in London, Boston or New York. These colors seem optimized for high-latitude cities, not mid- or low-latitude locations.
I live in a green-painted apartment and disagree about it being unflattering. There is a mirror opposite my table right now and I think I look fantastic. :)
I do agree about location and room colour - this is worth exploring. I wouldn't have done this pale green if I didn't have a south-facing apartment.
There are two parts to this discussion that need further clarity:
Light quality and direction: Outdoor light has a color, based on direction, intensity, season, and reflection of the world outside the window. Even the color of your glass. This is not something that shows up at a paint store, and the reason I always go for the samples.
Chips, Samples & the actual paint: Some companies are notorious for never matching their chips. Sometimes by a tint, sometimes by a hue. I've even had colors not match within the batch due to the paint distributor giving me something prepared with two different bases. GAH. So - check your paint when you get it. Brush it out on the wall and let it fully dry to see if it meets your expectations.
Then - just do it! It's just paint. It can change.
Yes! I'd like to see color discussed in terms of location (north, south, east west light). This is never addressed yet it would seem to me to be the most important factor.
Thank you, Mark. Loved this post! Everything looks better with gray.
I would like some help in how to determine what the base colour is, or the undertones. Do people just have a natural ability to figure this out? I've always been stumped about this- even with makeup. Sometimes its obvious- like a blueish white or yellowish white, but with colours I find it really hard. Any tips?
Funny that you mention Mark's hour tour. I spent nearly an hour the other night, looking for the link! I finally Googled, 'pastry chef house tour,' and his link showed up first. His design and color combination was so inspiring that it was worth the 1 hour search.
Nice post!
Did Mark bring over Commerce's coconut cake to your place? That cake is uh-may-zing!
@Ookpiik - I am not an expert, but the trick I've learned is use to your fan deck! Look at the tones of the darkest color on the card, and that will carry thru to the lighter colors. For example, I needed a light brown wall color that would go well with all the various greens in my house, as well as the reddish tones of the oak cabinetry, so I picked one that had a lot of green in its deepest pigment.
Hope that helps!
wordgrl--Here are some general guidelines about the temperature of different light exposures--In the northern hemisphere: South light is the brightest and seems to show colors at their truest, although some consider it to be a warm light (I think white walls work best in south light--just my own opinion, but it seems like whenever I see a photo of a beautiful room with white walls, there is a ton of south light pouring in); North light is cool, and warm colors are often used in north facing rooms to warm up the space; West light is warm and brings out the orange in colors, and cooler colors such as blues and greens work well in west facing rooms; East light is cool but not as cool as north light. Hope this helps a little.
Wonderful post! Very informative. Would love to hear from Mark again. Thank you!
I agree. I'd love to see how Mark would apply them. :)
@Ookpiik
@jenkwise
I still need more info on learning about UNDERTONES. What do you do if you don't have a fandeck?
I would love to paint rooms in my house with bright bold colors, but I feel very limited by my dark wood trim. I think that in most cases, you really need crisp white trim to work with the rich wall colors. Ultimately, I've ended up with some very faintly colored rooms (think: lightest swatch possible) for bedrooms, and then light greys in the main areas. I had to repaint my hallway three times before finally moving to a faintly purple-y grey that works. It's not white, but the cheery yellows that I wanted to love just made my house look like an old motel.
I would *love* to see a post on how to decorate and paint with dark wood trim--I rarely see pictures that have it. (I know some people would say: then paint it! But (1) it's too much and too daunting, and (2) it does look lovely... it's just hard to do much with color).
How great to meet Mark again. He's a very talented man.
For those struggling to see an undertone, put the color you're having trouble figuring out next to an very obvious example that's as near a primary color (yellow, red, blue) as possible. If you're still having trouble and find yourself wary of color, it might be worth it to invest in some inexpensive art paints (water color tubes can be very cheap in big-box stores craft areas. Squeeze out each of the primaries and mix two together in equal parts to make a secondary shade (green, orange, purple). Then try making a color scale with more red + blue to more blue + red gradually. I think this is really the best way to train the eye to see the subtleties of color--by doing a bit of gradual mixing hands-on. You can usually find basic art and color theory books fairly inexpensively too and that will serve you better than trying to look color wheels (a more complex color chart) on a PC, since everything is different from monitor monitor and can be effected by additional factors. I'm the art geek in the family having had formal classes from age 10 and up, so I've been gifting basic supplies to everyone who has the slightest interest in art for years for this very reason. ;) Understanding color is not only fun, it can be very helpful for every day use.
I agree with yasue.grogan that getting an inexpensive set of watercolors or acrylics will help people understand which pigments have warm or cool undertones.
I think it helps to think of color as a form of light, not a physical object. After all, everything in a dark room is black. If you light one candle, most things in that room will become tones of brown, black and gray. If you put a red light in the room, everything becomes red, orange, violet and brown/black. The objects in the room are reflecting the light that falls on them. They do not in themselves possess color.
This is why the kind of light, whether sunlight from north or south, the type of light bulb and placement, the surrounding objects, the glossiness of the object, and the direction of the light in the room all affect wall color. A room with a brick wall will have completely different colors than a room without. Hardwood floors create a bounce of reflected light that will make wall colors appear more golden.
Next, you have to consider relative colors. A medium gray next to black will look whiter - that same gray next to white will look darker. The blue paint that looked so gray in the paint store may look positively green when held up next to your beige tile.
This is why it's so hard to choose color! Paint companies know this, so they do create some fool proof guides, but there is no substitute for testing lots of samples.
Green is very much a go big or go home sort of wall color. Pastel shades can be tricky to work with. But green is heavily used in nature in very deep and intense shades, and most of us don't think going outside makes us look seasick. Even light green leafy plants tend to be many shades darker than we'd ordinarily pick for painting walls. And most of the plants that are viewed as "white" or "silver" are still darker than the sorts of light greens a lot of us think of when we think walls.
We wound up doing our master bedroom in bottle green and grey, and it's gives a relaxing feeling. The grey is a light and airy one that works well with the light from our all north facing windows. The green adds warmth and depth. Using two colors for the walls also lets the color shape the room and gives some subtle illusions. Amusingly, when we bought the place, the master bedroom was all a pastel sage green. Even tho supposedly dark walls make a room feel smaller, in our case it made the space feel larger, and it gives more of a sense of movement.
The other useful thing is that white rooms often reflect a lot of light at night. If you have a tough time getting your bedroom dark enough to suit, going for a dark wall color may help a lot.
Artist's paints do indeed give you range to manipulate the paint from thin to thick and then leverage undertone. Architectural paints do not give you that opportunity. In architectural paints the goal is one even, uniform thickness of paint film - it is never spread thinly to reveal undertone. Thinking in terms of undertone with regard to architectural paints is futile. Instead you need to remember that every paint color has a hue parent; every color will bear a resemblance to its hue parent. That resemblance is called hue bias.
In order to identify hue bias, you simply compare the color in question to saturated hues. It's a that which is like unto itself is drawn kinda thing. Never, ever use a white chip to try to identify any aspect of a color.
The world of architecture paints for the 3D built environ revolves around hue families and hue bias. Once you grasp that, you can solve any color conundrum including perfecting the art of partnering the perfect pitch of color nuance with geographic orientation.
I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I'd love to weigh in.
Like funcolors above, I can't recommend playing with artist's paints as a way to learning more about how to use wall colour effectively. It's not apples and oranges, more like Jona Gold and Red Delicious.Using artist paints is a fantastic way to learn more about artist paints, not wall paint.
Undertone as used when talking about artists paints usually refers to how a colour can change in hue or intensity when used a transparent or translucent glaze, or mixed into white (a tint).
Undertone used when talking about wall paint usually refers to the colour bias, and usually for colours that are quite desaturated (pale and/or low in colour intensity), simply because it's harder to see which direction the colour's going (bluish-grey, greenish-grey, brownish-grey?).
I also endorse funcolors recommendation to educate oneself about hue bias, and will add that it can be confusing to describe colours in terms of 'temperature'. One person's cool blue is another person's warm blue, and is a matter of experience. Learning to think in terms of hue-bias is super helpful, and eventually, can help to communicate colour more effectively, ie. violet-red, rather than cool-red, green-blue, rather than cool-blue.
Once you figure out a colour's bias, then you can start describing it in the other terms of value (how light or how dark) and chroma/intensity.
To clarify, the use of art paint colors can be helpful in the way that paint stores mix your paints using the same tint bases as painters colors. So if you know that Phthalo pigment is used, and that is a greenish-blue, then you know that a paint mixed using that tone will be a greenish-blue. Ultramarine Blue is slightly violet-blue. Phthalo Blue is cooler and Ultramarine Blue is warm, but you may need to paint yourself a color wheel to really 'get it'. Some people learn better by doing rather than reading information, plus it's fun. I had a painting teacher who forced me to make color charts for weeks on end, until I had mixed thousands of colors. It seemed like such a bore, but it was really the only way to truly know what each color could do.
The right choice of Color make a room appear cooler or warmer, duller or brighter.Color also determines the moods of the room so one should keep exploring which color suits their room.
Not in my case, green is my favorite color. Not many other colors are pleasing. Oh the joys of being color blind.
The colorants used in mixing architectural paint seldom align with any aspect of artist's paints. Because with architectural paints you are mixing into a base can of paint. You don't do that with artist's paints. Influence of the base and dramatically different strengths and opacity of architectural colorants will change everything you think you know about how to mix color.
It's natural to want to drawing similarities between how fine artists mix and use color color and color for the built environment because artists paints and 2 dimensional theories, and 'rules' ,and guidelines are most familiar and easiest to grasp. However, color for the 3 dimensional built environment has its own set of theories, and 'rules', and guidelines. While there are aspects that overlap, the reality is that trying to make ill-fitting concepts borrowed from 2-D fine arts fit the 3-D built environment is where frustration with choosing wall color manifests; square peg, round hole.
I would love some help here, I have maple cabinets and white subways tiles, the kitchen paint is dull, blue and it looks sickly grey at night, like in an old photograph but not at all charming or vintage. I would love a bright colour, like yellow or green that would not make me feel lethargic and bored in the kitchen. Will the yellows or greens look good?
I work in a university medical center and have an office with no windows that I want to have painted. Our internal people will use Pratt & Lambert paint so I am currently checking out the paint wheel to see what would work and I am at a loss... My old office is like a very creamy coffee color called safari so it matches everything. At home I have used lots of what use to be Ralph Lauren paint, hunting coat red, etc so I am not afraid of color just afraid of using a bolder color in such a small office space.I could do an accent wall to my back with a darker color...but I want the work space to be calm and soothing yet productive at the same time.. I mean I don't want to be depressed sitting in the room, especially b/c I will have to have my door closed most of the time... Any suggestions on color?
This article was really interesting! I think that Mark definitely has some great ideas! But Id also like to suggest the Color911 app to help you choose colors as well. I used it in my house and it let me choose colors from pre created palettes as well as pick colors form a photo of a rug or drapes etc. It helped me so much with choosing colors and I highly recommend it!