The summer after my Junior year of college I had the ultimate summer job: helping to restore a beautiful old mansion in Bryan, Texas. The owner of the house was converting it into an event venue, with a little suite of rooms upstairs for herself and her husband. In this suite was a room painted in a color called Pirate Coast. Pirate Coast was the most perfect, lovely, subtle shade of aqua blue, and just being in that room thrilled my little architect heart…
That fall, my roommate Rachel and I moved into a little apartment whose owner allowed us to paint the walls. Before we even saw the place, my mind was made up - my bedroom would be Pirate Coast. Imagine my surprise when, under the glaring lights of Lowe's, the swatch looked - green. Yucky, toothpaste-y green. But, I reasoned, it was probably just the lighting in the store. In my bedroom, I was sure it would be perfect. I was determined to have Pirate Coast.
This was a mistake.
I lugged the paint bucket home and my roommate and I set to work. About halfway through, Rachel articulated a worry already taking shape in my own mind - namely, that the color was super, super light. "Is it supposed to look like this? I can hardly tell which parts of the wall I've already painted." I hated to admit that she was right. The only discernible difference between the painted and non-painted parts of the wall was that the painted parts were shiny and wet. "Keep on painting!" I urged. "Maybe it'll be darker when it dries." My aqua dream died hard.
The paint was a tiny bit darker when it dried, but it was still not the perfect subtle aqua blue I was looking for. In fact, it was...well, Rachel and I had no idea what it was. If you held something green up to the wall, it looked green. In the presence of blue things, it was tentatively blue. But only very slightly. I would've called it white, only the ceiling was white, and the wall was clearly not the same color as the ceiling. I had painted by bedroom some bizarre, nameless un-color.
Aided and abetted by the paint fumes now filling my tiny room, our feelings about Pirate Coast became progressively more absurd and existential. "What is color? Where am I? Are there walls in this room? I cannot tell because they are no color. It's almost like my dresser is floating in front of a giant void."
And then we laughed and laughed and laughed, until we were rolling on the floor, about the color that was no color at all.
For a while I was determined to live with the strangely shape-shifting color in my bedroom. After all, we had done a lot of work, and that bucket of paint cost me 12 dollars. I only held out for two days. In a way I never would've anticipated, not knowing what color my bedroom was slowly began to drive me insane. I kept holding things up to the wall, trying to determine what color it was. For a few hours, I would be satisfied that it was, indeed, blue. But then the next day, I'd wake up and think "My room is green. No, wait, it's blue. No, wait...green." In the middle of the day, the color hardly registered at all. Sometimes, right after sunset, it would even take on an odd yellowish tinge. It got to the point where just being in the room was strangely unsettling. That color was messing with my mind.
So I went back to Lowe's, and I did what you should do when picking out color - I got a bunch of paint chips, and I taped them to the wall in different parts of the room, and duly considered them, in all different kinds of lights. I finally settled on something that was comfortably aqua - that is, a blue with some green it, but very distinctly a shade of blue. (I don't remember the name of this color - probably "Gentle Breeze" or some such - but I do know it was nowhere near as cool as "Pirate Coast".) I was satisfied with the new color of my room, and I didn't even mind paying an extra 12 dollars to save my sanity. Although I did decide, in the end, to leave one wall of my room as the mysterious, shape-shifting Pirate Coast. Just for the memories.
Image: Flickr member joshwept licensed for use by Creative Commons
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Interesting. I actually prefer slightly dynamic colours that change throughout the day and the seasons.
Wait wait - that is the exact kind of color that I want to paint my bathroom. Lots of wood in there and plain white is just too- well- white.
Funny how colors can do that to us - mess with our eyes and our minds!
We did that twice in our kitchen. Our friends had the warmest and most awesome kitchen - painted a golden yellow. So we tried it. I didn't even get one coat into it before both my husband and I voted NO. Wanting to still be funky and warm and have a cool color - we went to a pumpkin orange. That lasted a few months before it was painted out - after discussions asking ourselves if it really was pumpkin orange, was it TOO orange, did it seem more yellowy-orange or reddy orange?
You are NOT alone - there ARE other crazy people out there with crazy color ideas!
@ Jan...maybe Pirate Coast is perfect for you. It's still made by Valspar, I believe. Just be smarter than I was and try the swatch out on the wall before you paint. :)
Hahaha. That reminds me of the first time I decided to paint my room. My parents were out of town and I'd had stark white walls and I wanted something more feminine (think beiges and pale greens and lace). I went to the hardware store and picked out "Candlelit Beige" which sounded wonderfully creamy and ivory and beige-y to me.
It was white. It was pretty much the same white I had at home. To this day the only time I notice a difference in paint color (when I go home) is the barest hint of yellow in a certain angle of sunlight. Decorating fail.
and then there are the paint FAILS that the previous owners of our home didn't bother to rectify...various shades of salmon, and a couple of obnoxious purple walls. whyyyy??
I like big, bright, loud color, and I hate beige. When I moved into my house, the previous owners had painted in multiple shades and finishes of beige, and left the cans (unlabled, natch) in the garage. I would very carefully examine them, sure I had the correct beige for the application, start painting and realize it was totally wrong. And it was too late. I hate them regularly for that, and have nearly painted the entire house other, non-beige colors. But I have a friend who adores superlight pastels. When she'd ask me what I thought, I had to try to come up with something other than what I thought, which is, "Did you actually paint?"
ha: "our feelings about Pirate Coast became progressively more absurd and existential." i can relate to this feeling. we recently painted our sage green bedroom a nice neutral grey (martha stewart "heavy goose"). when we painted a swatch on the wall, it was clearly grey, different from the sage green - perfect! yet...when we started painting the the walls...it began to look like the exact same color. like we weren't painting at all. it's not that the paint wasn't getting good coverage...and i like it better than the green...but it still looks like we didn't do anything. i'm so confused!
Ugh, I'm still living with my paint mistake. My prob, I think, is the finish and not the color per se but which is affected by it nonetheless. I'll def be repainting in no time at all.
For 3 years i walked by a house, and every day i would wonder about the color," is it blue?, purple, lilac, aqua...no, wait, blue, or maybe violet"
Everyday.... until they painted the house brown.... to this day i dont know what color it was, and have never seen something that shade again
Thank goodness you're not actually colour blind. (Imagine experiencing this on a daily basis.)
This reminds me of two important decorating rules that I had to learn by experience:
1) Never pick a color by its name! We painted our entire den "pumpkin bread" because my husband is obsessed with pumpkin and the swatch looked like it would bring out the right shades in our retro couch. I painted all through the night, unable to see the color in good light, and the next day I really kicked myself. It was like a haunted house-- an eerie, dark glow all the time!!! We have since repainted.
AND 2) Just because paint looks AWESOME somewhere (like "tranquility" blue in our basement! so perfectly retro!) does NOT mean it will look great in another place (like in our sunroom-- all the light made it look way too icy blue and not nearly as Tiffany's.) Use those swatches, and when in doubt, buy the $3 sample jar!
I painted my hallway three different shades of cream. My husband thought I was nuts when I kept saying the one cream was orange and that the other cream was white. I usually have had no problems picking out paint colors, but apparently cream throws me for a loop!
4 tries on my bathroom and 3 in the kitchen here. i think it is normal. i did swatches and everything, the little jar testers. it just changes when you actually paint the whole room. sometimes, trial and error is the best way : )
When moving out of a rental studio condo we had to touch up the walls. Each wall 'looked' the same color until we realized the owner used 3 different shades of the same olive green color. Good thing they left a can of each. Too bad we had to try each one on each wall. Blah! The painting in our new condo is going much better. We like the colors, but the textured walls are a pain - there is no straight edge on any wall. Madness.
I chose a shade called Persimmon for an accent wall in my old living room (which happened to be 22 feet tall). The ex and I started painting in the evening and worked until 2 am to finish two coats. In the morning it wasn't Persimmon but rather a Texas Longhorns burnt orange. Go Horns!
Based on a picture in Southern Living mag, I chose a SW color called Ancestral Gold. In certain places in the room at some times, it actually looks lime green. And with those curly bulbs, I can make it look like that any time of the day!
I always have problems like this!!! I'm determined to start getting it right though. I've been learning about color theory and the science behind choosing colors, but in the end it's really about which paint chip looks best!
Maybe you'd like Rainwashed by Sherwin Williams...I just used it in our living room!
http://bonnieprojects.blogspot.com/2012/08/choosing-paint-colors.html