From Awm: quote: (Just a thought: adding black would muddy every hue in the paint, would it not?) Absolutely not. it will desaturate , just the same as your complementary colors. If you have found the perfect color in glidden, see if your BM store will match it in an Aura base. add some more phthalo green on the blue side and a few drops of yellow; may need to add back to red, just depends what utc's or machine tints you use. You can mix some pretty high chroma greens with your blues+yellow, but you gotta know which ones to use. Something you may or may not know, but lemon yellow is a cool yellow. The white in the cans of paint is there for your hiding power. It is the opacity of your pastel , muted or lighter bases. Once you get into your deeper bases from a mid 3 and up , you won't have but very little white (titatium dioxide) in the can. Some bases will not have any white. If you have the utc's and your base then do some practice and test with a tester tube and document down to the 10th of a drop on your samples before adding full strength to your paint can. In a lot of BM preview colors they do not use black but very few. Even after your selected color is mixed, it will eventually be summed up from the light that is bounced around in the room.

I do like full-spectrum paint and can definitely see the difference in most cases. If you're considering full spectrum paint, be aware that it's appearance often changes more in different light than convention paint. The technical name for this escapes me. Conventional paint companies try to minimized this effect in their pigment combinations. I'm not wild about the ICI paints Ellen Kennon uses, but I like the appearance of ICI Velvet Sheen much better than Benjamin Moore eggshell. I believe that Kauffman uses Pratt Lambert or maybe Benjamin Moore paint as his base. Any of them are decent products. Think of Gardz as a sealer rather than a primer. You'll still need primer over the Gardz if you want a decent finish. That combination worked well for me when I removed texture from a ceiling.

Paintguy, I know we disagree on a couple things, but you rock. You have established a paint/color point of view, you stick with it, you are consistent and you express your thoughts with respect and sometimes even a cute little sense of humor. ;-) You have a gift of saying a whole lot with few words. You are confident in what you've done, seen, and what you know and I for one appreciate your sharing that insight very much. kashka - that's it exactly! How DOES what you learned in art class apply to coloring the built environment? What CAN you take away from the theory books and use, and what parts of theory are just that, theory? My history with "color theory" is somewhat amusing. I can tell you that while in the midst of it, it really wasn't very funny. When I came out the other side from those experiences :-) and ventured in to this realm, we know as wall color, I was confused. I was trying to take what I knew about color before and make it fit in my new color world. It didn't work. I know that I have a unique point of view on color and those experiences are why. This is the best way I can describe what I've experienced. There is no one to ask, nothing to reference, no comprehensive studies just floating around on the www that speak to what happens to color on three-dimensional structure -- that amalgamation of subtractive color, form, light, and people. That's why I'm always asking tell me what you know, tell me how and why you know it, show me what you've done. There's some stuff out of Sweden from the late '90s, there's some stuff going on in the UK today, but nothing to go get and use NOW. Instead, all you will find repeatedly is various interpretations of two-dimensional color theory forced on the three-dimensional. It's like trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. Pound hard enough and you can probably get that peg wedged in that round hole to the point that you can say it fits. The square peg will be battered. Corners clumsily whittled and splintered. By no means a good fit in that round hole, but it made it in none the less. Just talk about color theory and it all *sounds* reasonable, plausible. But.... go DO it. Execute to those ideals three-dimensionally. What happens? What works? Then add in another important factor, human beings. What changes? What parts of conventional, two-dimensional color theory flies out the window and leaves you standing there with nothing but your own set of eyeballs to figure it all out. Books about color are great and the more you are exposed to the better, of course. Personally, I'm to the point that all the color theory books are the same -- none of them speak to the challenges that I face. I need information, data, guidance that will facilitate forecasting how a particular color will *appear* in a room, on a house, etc. I have developed my own process, made my own observations, solved some of those challenges on my own - just by trial and error and paying attention. I know what works for me, but what about everyone else? This is why I am so passionate about what color options are made available to the color consumer. Those options increase the odds of the average consumer of color being able to make a successful partnership between the light that the have to work with, their stuff, and their color expectations. With a myriad of options available, the actual mixing of the color (or having it mixed) and deciding on the paint are the easiest parts of the whole process. There are harder questions to answer. People are the main priority. Light is boss - always. Stuff (design style, furniture, art, window treatments, etc.) matter too. How do you take the essence of those three major points of criteria and translate it into a single color. That's asking a lot out of something as simple as color, isn't it? However, that's not all we're looking for. That's not all we want color to do. We want cohesiveness. We want harmony. We want color to create atmosphere. We want color to organize and define. We want color to customize, individualize and make sanctuary out of empty, blank walls. There is much work to do. There is a lot to discover. When I say that color is a journey, I'm not kidding. And theres always an alternative -- lower your expectations of color and just pick something off the shelf and be done with it that certainly can work too. :-)

I thought I would post an update to this thread. Ellen mentioned this thread in her blog, this thread was linked. My daughter did use her paint to paint several rooms. She talked to Ellen on the phone and really enjoyed their conversation. She said Ellen was very helpful. She painted her bedroom Gustavian Gray. She gave Ellen the room size and Ellen told her to buy 3 gallons but 2 was plenty. She never even opened the 3d gallon but of course was unable to return it. That kind of hurts when it's $50.00 a gallon. I don't know why the amount was so off, perhaps my daughter gave incorrect dimensions. Anyway, my daughter is very pleased with this color. It's very unusual. It's not really gray but it is. It also looks kind of blue and kind of green. I personally don't like it very much but I guess that doesn't matter since my daughter does. She painted an office Olive. This color took two plus coats to cover since it is darker. I like it and so does my daughter. She painted her family room and kitchen buttercream. I really like this color. Again, it looks different depending on the light. Sometimes it looks like a soft yellow, sometimes more beige. I like it better in the family room then the kitchen, however. My daughter's cabinets are maple and have a yellow tone. I think the wall color is too close to the cabinet colors. It looks okay but I would prefer more contrast. But again, my daughter is happy with it. It is a pretty pleasant color. Ellen told her to buy 2 gallons but it took 3. I'm not sure why the amount was off, but it wasn't a problem to buy another gallon. As for whether I can tell a difference between this paint and regular paint...honestly I can't. It's nice paint. It went on well. It looks very nice but I can't really say it looks better then the paint in my house that is Sherwin Williams and Behers. Maybe it's me because so many people seem to think it looks different but I don't really see it. One thing my daughter said she liked was that there was enough choice of colors but not too many choices. I understand what she means. When you go to Sherwin Williams there are dozens of beiges for example. It's easier to pick colors when there are fewer colors to pick from. Two many colors can be overwelming but Ellen has enough but not too much.