It would seem to me if he has to have all the paint colors he 'likes' cut by 50% then he's not very good at picking out paint colors. :)

Maybe he should quit choosing the colors he likes and start picking the right ones for the light/space he has to work with.

Hilarious funcolours.

I also got some good advice from that issue (or maybe it was the previous one - old brain doesn't function like it used to). I was trying to choose a colour I love for my bedroom and was looking a fairly intense turquoise blue/greens, but just couldn't commit. The advice in House Beautiful was to use a neutral and then use the colours you love as an accent. Something I probably knew but had been ignoring. I found a lovely gray/green that is a shade or two darker than silver sage and from the samples I've done on the wall, it seems like a colour I can live with for a while and change out accent colours as my tastes or as the seasons change.

I just got a subscription to HB and I'm really loving it.

Interesting...I had often read the same thing and it made a lot of sense to me. Then just last night I was on Donald Kaufman's web site and he seems to say the exact opposite.

"try to choose a paint chip that is twice as gray and twice as dark as you envision in the room"

He says once it is on the walls, it is always much lighter and more intense. Which doesn't make sense to me...but I admit I don't know much about all this. Maybe it has to do with the difference in full spectrum vs regular paints.

I must agree with funcolors comment on this. It's not that mixing 50% would never work....as trailrunner mentioned, it could be just what the doctor ordered for a ceiling or for a wall that had completely different light. But I always wonder when I read that someone had their Perfect color mixed at 50% or 75%, etc., why they feel that it's the perfect color? If you found the perfect color, then, paint it. Maybe it's just that I don't want to mess with custom colors....but I just think it makes more sense to pick a chip that works for your room and light situation, have it mixed up in the sheen that works too, and then, when the room is done, know what color you chose.

Red

I was hoping funcolors would post. So,not all designers that are quoted are experts with colors? It is so hard to know what makes sense and what doesn't. I have read so much on HD from posters about colors being hard to choose or being brighter than expected etc and thought perhaps this guy might be on to a quick fix.

I learn more from you guys than anywhere else.

I don't know why he doesn't just recommend using one of the lighter colors on the paint strip. When you start messing around with the formula you never know exactly what you are going to get.

It may be a tip that works for him.

It may also be a formula that works out for bridging the gap between the intensity of colors HE likes and the colors his CLIENTS are happy with.

I won't paint with anything I haven't tested on my walls. And I've painted a LOT of rooms. It's just too hard to pick from a chip, and there's too much variation between types and brands. I even think those large prepainted chips are misleading. People shouldn't beat themselves up if they're not good at it!

There is no quick fix. There is no universal good color, no matter what anyone says. Get a bunch of samples you think are close, try them out -- ruin a wall and make some nice BIG squares -- and trust your gut reaction. Picking paint is not an intellectual exercise you can solve with words and logic. You have to SEE it, and not in a vacuum. You have to see the colors, in your house, in your light, with your stuff. Your family has to walk by and say "yuk" or "pretty".

And, personally, I think once you start introducing percentages into it, you pave the way to madness. I can only see that as a device, as redbazel says, for a complementary ceiling or trim or something. If you like a color, pick it. If not, pick one up or down the card.

If you're not shopping at a good local paint shop, where there's someone you can talk to, you really should be. Mine helped me pick trim colors, even gave me contacts to find an amazing painter.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for sharing, TTodd. Magazine advice is so fun to discuss.

I am always pretty confident when I settle on a paint card, but I never know how far down the chips to go. It sounds stupid, but I can't figure out which green will look like a medium green once it is on all my walls.

For instance, is SW Liveable Green a barely-there green or feel sure that this-is-a-green-room?

What a silly idea...this is a "pro"??? If you choose the right color for the room given it's lighting, floors, furnishings it should appear just as you think it will. I can't say I've ever been "surprised" by a color's intensity after painting all 4 walls. In my case it seems the opposite usually occurs...the "drama" melts away a bit...which is just the way I want it normally. I have usually advised people to go one darker since many people seem to be a bit shy with color...especially if they've been living with whitish walls. Even a 2 on the paint strip starts to scare them lol.

I wonder if this guy has ever taken his 50% custom color and then matched it to the paint chips to see WHAT color he really has now? He might learn something about choosing the right tones to start with. :)

I think the HB artice is good advice for a novice decorator which may be whom the advice was intended. The folks on this board are NOT novice decorators, so of course the advice seems absurd. I think the general theory that is that a lighter color is much easier to live with than a darker color and is probably good advice so many.

i always find that the overall color looks less dark and intense when up on all 4 walls...or even up on an entire wall! i tend to like darker, richer colors, but often found when i painted just alittle swatch on the wall i worried that it was too dark and intense....over the years i have learned that the color often 'looks lighter" once completely up and have learned to overlook the initial "shock" of the color....so i'm not sure what this expert is referring to???

Depends on who's in the room. I'm sure some people would tell you it was way too much, others would say it's perfect. You could get 10 of the best color people in the world to tell you it was the perfect color, but if you didn't like it, would that mean anything? It wouldn't to me. I'd have to go with the color I really thought was the right one.

What you are describing is not stupid. It is pretty much what most people struggle with. In fact, many people can't even get to that one card, so you're doing pretty well!

I have also used colors and liked them in one apartment, then found that they just did not work in another, even though I was bringing all my stuff with me, and had the same tastes etc. It was about the light, the walls themselves, etc.

And you can't rely on a magazine or an Internet photo, as the colors are not color-corrected and vary enormously through the printing process and from monitor to monitor. Use them only as a very loose guide.

Bottom line -- you HAVE to try it.

When a homeowner asks me (Imagine that; asking a carpenter about colors) about a particularly strong color, I give a similar response: Once you get it on all four walls, the color is going to reinforce itself by reflection, and intensify. I have given that warning as many times as I've been asked, and sometimes they pick the next lighter chip on the card in reaction.
The admonition pertains to very saturated colors. It hardly would need to be applied to soft colors, would it?
Casey

"Picking paint is not an intellectual exercise you can solve with words and logic. You have to SEE it, and not in a vacuum. You have to see the colors, in your house, in your light, with your stuff. "

That's SO TRUE! The color that works so fabulously well in my husband's office (a dark olivey green) looked positively putrid in my older son's bedroom located directly above. Sonny's windows face west -- most of Hubby's windows face east. Sonny has more daylight, Hubby has more reflected light. Sonny has khaki carpet; Hubby has slate tile. Those factors make the same paint perfection in one room, and putrid in the other.

Ya know, that's a good point about it being a method that works for him. Maybe it's his internal color barometer kind of a deal. He knows how to find one *kind* of color and then cutting it in half is his magic recipe -- it works for him.

The poor guy we're talking about probably walks around thinking he's pure genius with color and would be shocked to hear that someone else thought it was a ridiculous way to go about paint colors! I hope he never sees this. lol!

A lot of times with interior designers, architects, redesigners (whatever job involves color) they do not fully *get* that everyone sees and experiences color differently. I mean they may repeat that very statement, but they do not really understand what it means. There is much to sort out because there is a lot of common ground among our human eyeballs - there's no question about that. Yet each of us have our own way of experiencing the whole sensation of color -- and THAT'S the part that escapes many. And you have to acknowledge that many of them color to their own aesthetic and their own color sense because they truly believe they are *right* about color. There's also some ego to manage in this complicated pot of color! :~D

The first thing I do is try to get into my client's head in a way. I have to figure out where they are with color. What's their visual acuity? Visual acuity can run on a scale from like an opossum up to very acute or even tetrachromatic -- something that's just totally off the scale color-sensitive. Plus, everyone is at a different point in their color journey -- from not having one iota of conscious notice of color all the way up to sensing every dimensional nook and cranny of color -- and light.

As a color professional, it would be wrong for me to color from the point I am in MY color journey. I have to determine the level of visual acuity and figure out where the other person is on THEIR color journey and then join them on their level, their path in the journey.

That's really what a color designer/consultant should be doing. That's really what the "gift" is. Not coming up with obtuse color "advice".

When you look at it from this perspective, from this truth and reality, it's not so easy to come up with sound bites and clever quotes about color that will please magazine editors and the average reader who has an attention span of about a second and a half. As a result the quotes in a lot of these magazines from "color experts" are just plain stupid. The "color experts" who have no experience working with people can't fake it. Because you can't make this stuff up -- you've either walked down someone elses color path and focused on seeing color through other eyeballs or you haven't.

And if they don't have those experiences to speak to, if they aren't authentically passionate about the universal experience of color, not just their own, then what's left for them to say about color?

Not much.

And so that's where all the magazine-suitable, essentially stupid, quotes and tips and tricks come from. The only things left for them to say is stuff like "red makes you hungry" and "driving a red car means you're an extrovert" or find a paint color and always 'go one up' on the strip or you HAVE to have an inspiration pieces, (I could go on for days).

But it's not like I'm the Grand Color Poobah and can make up or enforce some agenda or rules so -- really -- who the hell am I to criticize or say one way or another. I'm just an average people-of-earth member too.

I read this in that same issue and really felt conflicted. How does mixing it with 50% white not completely change the color all together? Wouldn't you just find THAT paint swatch and do that?

I loved that issue though- I am NOT a blue person, but I really ended up feeling differently about it when I got done with that issue!

Anyone else get the GREAT $5 deal for the year subscription to HB? I was SO thrilled about it!

It's Nancy Corzine on BM Iceberg (and nancy is hardly a novice - lol)

she said:

"I'm not fond of rooms with hard edges, either in looks or in feeling. This color is all shimmery opalescence, a cool, silvery gray-blue that fits in anywhere and can pull all the different blues in a room together. Usually I cut IT half-and-half with white so that it ends up looking like the paint chip, because it gets darker once you have all four walls reflecting on each other. I'll even pour a bit of blue into the white I use on the ceiling to give it a tint. You don't really notice the blue - -it just softens the white".

What she said makes perfect sense to me. Blue has the tendency to build up its intensity in a room, so what you see on a chip would multiply when you put it on 4 walls. She could choose a lighter blue but it's easier for most people to envision the final color you want on a chip than to choose a lighter chip and try to imagine how it builds up in a room.

Might be a silly question and I have not read all the comments on this, but, isn't a color at 50% or 75% a different color than the original? It seems to me it would be!

Been reading with great interest, as always.

I think Bella makes a great point about a designer possibly using this as a way to manage a client's expectation rather than as a means of choosing color.

Amy, you're a better woman than I because whatever point bella is making is completely lost on me -- and I read it like five times. lol!

I wonder if the comments about Iceberg go with a picture of a specific room and the information is about how Iceberg worked in that one instance. If that's not the case, almost every sentence in the quote has issues for discussion.

I also agree cutting the color strength makes it a different color so I can't really see the point. Unless putting it on a ceiling, that to me is scarier than testing out another one!

I should say I 'can' see the point but I don't think that way would work for me.

I just wanted to let Paint Chips know that I painted a room Liveable Green once and it was definetly NOT liveable. It was in your face GREEN. So, I painted over it with a softer sage green and love it! I've painted a lot of rooms in the last couple of years in several different houses. All I can say is that I'm just never sure until at least 2 wall are painted. Some colors looked lighter and some colors looked darker. I'm not blessed with that wonderful eye for color some people have. So, I try to pick what I think is close to what I want and then make sample boards. Sometimes even this method doesn't really read right. Any how, I'm not sure where I'm going with this except to say that we each seem to have a different method that seems to work for us. So, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Do what works for you.

It depends on the LRV(light reflective value)which is determined by the direction the room is facing. The higher the LRV the lighter/brighter the room will be. The LRV can usually be found on the back of the sample card, or you can ask the paint professional.

You really don't know *what* the color will look like until you get it on the specific wall(s) you want to paint. Color samples are merely a guideline. ;o)

My mom does that 50% thing and as always liked it. I guess because the color on the wall fits more with her expectation in her imagination? This is an interesting post!

I wonder if this is more about how you experience the color, rather than what really happens with the color? It is one thing to have a color on one surface in front of you, and have the surrounding 3 walls and ceiling a different color. It feels differently when all 4 walls (and perhaps the ceiling) are the same color. It is almost as if you are immersed in the color, with no relief for your eyes. So of course, if the color is everywhere, it the experience is more intense.

Certainly there is some reflective value. My parents had a second living room with a medium blue wall-to-wall carpeting. My mother wasn't big on a lot of color on the walls, and the decorator told her to leave the walls white, as there would be blue reflected from the carpeting. It was true, it felt that way, but only during daylight, and pretty bright daylight at that. Otherwise, the walls read white. So, while there may be some reflective effect from one wall to another, I don't see it making major changes in the actual intensity of the color. Four white walls in a room don't feel whiter because they reflect off one another. They space feels whiter because you are immersed in the white.

Did any of that make sense to anyone but me? LOL

Make perfect sense to me, Les. As every you said always does. :-)

There is definitely a difference in what you see on the chip versus what you perceive in real life (after all 4 walls are painted) ..Call it additive property? The color is the same as the chip but some how you perceive them as more intense.

I painted DS' room Light blue (F&B) and the chip appear very grey with only hint of blue. After all walls are painted, the blue came out and the room was the perfect blue. My DH came in and said, "I thought you were going to paint the room gray -- you changed your mind again? " LOL. And there are the many times when my friends complained to me, "yike--that blue looks so much darker in real life than on the chip!" .. One friend even brought the bucket back to the store complaining that they mix her the wrong blue LOL :-)