mindstorm:

You've got mail, but a couple more things.

You absolutely cannot go by those online color samples, it's a waste of time. Espcially on something like a full spectrum paint, and when you're going after something as nuanced as you are.

Did you actually paint those "white" samples yet? Or are you just looking at them in the cans? Also, DKC requires a lot of stirring to get all the pigment blended well.

My cards only go up to 64, so I can't help you with #74. But #6 is definitely not white. It's very much a white, softly tinted with blue. I see it clearly on the card, so if you've painted it on a board and you don't see it, then yeah, I think they made a mistake. It's basically a shade or two lighter than #29.

All three of these are giving me a slight little green "thing" under incandescent light, although they're all definite blues. I want to look at them in daylight before I pronounce judgment on the green.

But again, with these full spectrum paints, it's entirely possible that it will be blue during the day and green at night. Kind of like my DKC#16, which I love, but is gray in daylight and taupe/almost tan at night.

Speaking of ice blues, I've decided to use that as the accent color in my master bedroom and just discovered a Smith and Noble linen called "Dream". You have GOT to check it out if you need fabric for this room too. It's beautiful.

Okay, more tomorrow.

Ivette

Okay, natural daylight. It's very overcast here this morning so bear that in mind, but nevertheless, I am seeing ALOT of green here.

While none of them are what I would call sage, they are definitely a very green blue, in particular #29 and #37. #6 is a little more blue, but it's still a greenish blue. They're quite nice actually, very watery and sophisticated. But if you want pure blue, none of these are going to work, if you ask me (and you did!). :)

Let me go through the chips myself and see what I can come up with. I'll look at all I have, including P&L, Schreuder's, and Farrow & Ball and let you know later. But yeah, none of these babies are a true blue with no green.

Ivette

Oh bless you Ivette, for looking!

Yes my daytime samples also show them to be very green. And you're right, they're not really sage, but sort of a grayish green or a bluish green - not a yellow or khaki-ish green which is really what I suppose sage is.

I don't mind having some green in the color - the SOPHISTICATED and watery part sounds nice. It is just that I'm getting a bit fed up of trying these blue-green colors that wind up being overtaken by the green AND turn out so dark. As I mentioned, the #37 that I have - based on your feedback, it must be the 37 I have since it is quite dark - is predominantly green as it is even more so than the C2-Icefog. My objections to the Icefog is both the intensity of color (primarily) and the green-ness (a close second but slowly growing everyday that I can't find a replacement color!).

So, I'm liking the #6 for its near-whiteness but would love to have something like it in a blue or gray shade. I know you'd asked for pictures of my RL Poncho White rooms but I haven't taken a good shot that shows the blue, yet - it really is a white where you can see the blue against the trim or if you look down the room at an oblique angle to the walls. Straight up at them all you see is white. So, my thinking was to be able to get a bit more of a tint in the white for the bedrooms. (At this rate, I'm going to have to take my RL-PW and add a drop or two of a blue I like into it).

I do like the sound of watery or glass-like colors that don't become acqua or dominate with green. BUT since that seems to be a tall order, a pale silver-blue or gray-blue will be wonderful.

Ivette, thank you so much for offering to look - that's really going above and beyond! I so appreciate any heads up you can give me!

Well, I think I did.

These two colors are definite silvery blues, with no hint of green in any of my lights. Check out DKC #24 and DKC#44.

#24 is much lighter, and I think is exactly what you're going for. #44 is slightly darker. When I asked DH what he thought about the other colors, he said "green". When I asked him what he thought of these blues he said "yeah, it's blue, but kinda gray isn't it?" PERFECT!

Check them out!

Ivette

Ok thank you so so much! That sounds exactly like the sort of guidance I want. Perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect perfect.

I'm on it DK24 and DK44 sound like they will perfectly fit the bill - and DK24 sounds EXACTLY like what I want then.

Thanks so very very much Ivette!

-ls

My pleasure!!

I didn't even bother looking at the other brands once I found these.......

Have fun trying them,
Ivette

Update: I just ordered DKC24. The girl I spoke to did sound surprised that I was going for DK24 and said I wanted a blue - said that DK24 is pale alright but it is a lavender color - eep! I hope I get the blue-gray you see and not lavender! She did recommend a color from the white collection as well so I've ordered that as well - DK68.

Hopefully they'll be silver blue and not pink or mauve or worse yet! green! (Actually I don't think they'll pan out to be green - I think that is one frequency that has been effectively eliminated from these colors. So that is the biggest victory :-) )

Will let you know of my experiments - hopefully they'll be here tomorrow!

OMG. That's the thing. You ordered just a SAMPLE right? Not a gallon. I have to admit I sort of see the slightest blush of pink, maybe. My DKC#3 cream has this too. It's just the most subtle thing. Makes it exquisite. But with blue, ummmmm, no. Did you get a sample of #44 too? No pink there! But it is darker.

Hmmmmm. Jeez, I hope you only ordered a sample can. These full spectrum paints are really tricky!

Ivette

Ivette, No problem! I ordered the samples of all three. But if it is the 'slightest blush of pink" well, that wouldn't be entirely surprising now, would it? I mean to say, if sort of a silver blue is what one is after ... it seems to me that to get that silvery color in a blue, you get it with the mauvey-lavendery-pink pigmentation. Seems to be the case in nature too unless it is actual argentum that is showing up in petals and leaves. So, that was the reason I didn't discount getting DK24 at all. We'll see what comes through in my northern Massachusetts light.

I did get 44 but in addition, I've ordered that DK68 - from hte white collection that Color Factory person said was a gray-blue pigmented white.

Thanks again so much for your help! I'm dying to see the colors now. Crossing fingers that they'll be here tomorrow.

-ls

Grrr! Dratted FedEx man in Boston got nervous about delivering the package and returned it to Color Factory! Aarrgh! I was disappointed not to get the package yesterday and now I won't have it today either. This is no season to be sending packages BACK! Sheesh. And I'm dying to see this DK24/DK44/DK68 set!

Huh??? What the hell was he nervous about???

Sorry, haven't had time to look at Borrowed Light yet.

Ivette

Ivette,
So I finally got the tins yesterday. I have to say - you must have a REALLY good eye to see any color in there in DK-24. Since you tell me there is a blue I can make myself see a bit of a blue shade at the edges of the paint between the white background of the poster board and the paint I've painted on it - but all the willing in the world won't make me see any color in the center of the swatch. It just looks pure white! I wanted to have a bit more blue in the paint so that the color is really pale but still noticeable - otherwise I've got the same situation as I do with the RL-Poncho White where I can see a color where the paint butts against the trim or ceiling but is white everywhere else. The one they'd suggested - DK68 is even whiter yet. And I'm an idiot and goofed with 44. I ordered 24 and 42 apparently instead of 24 and 44 (hmmm, although ... I do recall the girl telling me that 44 was a much darker blue color and was I sure about getting it? At any rate, I got 42 here). 42 is this peachy yellow color in the tin and not at all a color of interest to me so I haven't swatchified it.

Ugh! this paint situation sucks. I need to get this frightful C2 Icefog off my walls so I'll probably get DK24 or 68 on there so at least the walls are no longer offensive.

Thanks a ton for your help, though! Meanwhile if anyone should find a pale blue that is fairly green-free, would love a heads up.

Actually ignore that last post. The one coat I was looking at last night and this morning was definitely very pale and virtually white so I knew I'd have to test after a second coat. Applied the second coat and when I posted above, the second coat of paint was dry to the touch but still showed up mostly white.

HOWEVER, it must not have been quite dry because it is now showing up more of the blue-gray - a really very very pretty blue-gray at that! It is a pale color which is just what I wanted. It is a lovely blue-gray color which is also just what I wanted.

So I really am most happy with DK24. Still can't see the blue in DK68 but so what, I have my paint in DK24! So call off the hounds and thank you so very very much Ivette. You found me my paint color! Very very psyched. Ordering tomorrow if Color Factory is open tomorrow. Halleluiah!

Mindstorm:

I can't remember if I told you or not, I know I posted this somewhere, that DKC paint changes extremely with the second coat. It's uncanny actually. The second coat makes all the difference in the world. And the color in the can means nothing. My DKC #3 which is the most beautiful soft cream on the planet, looks PEACH in the can. I freaked at first, but kept the faith, and I was rewarded.

I'm so glad you liked it. It's a most definitely BLUE. DKC #44 is darker, although it's not DARK dark. But I do think it's probably more blue than what you're looking for.

OMG, I am SO HAPPY you like it!!!

Ivette

P.S. Does this mean I'm off the hook on Borrowed Light?? I'm SO sorry, I just haven't had time with Dad coming into town, and parties, and the Nutcracker..... But I will have time tomorrow. Oh! I just remembered that's for a different room, so I am NOT off the hook! Okay, will post tomorrow.

Good night, oh she with the perfect shade of soft blue!

That's just a sample board. Once you have that color on all the walls and bouncing off itself, it will become slightly more intense. What I am looking forward to hearing however, is how this color changes to you during different times of day. That is something you're either going to love or hate, and regrettably there is no knowing until you've painted the whole room and let it dry for a few days.

Good luck!
Ivette

Ivette,
I know and I am p-s-y-c-h-e-d p-s-y-c-h-e-d psyched! You want to know how I'll like it when the color is over the entire room? I want to know how it'll be like when I have the color in my entire house?! I love it so much I want to paint my whole inside of the house in it. Well, I suppose I'll start with the one room.

DK seems to change a lot while drying too. My first review above was indeed after the second coat but evidently I hadn't let it dry sufficiently. The light conditions hadn't changed between the two reviews since all scrutiny was by bulbs of various classes and colors. What must have changed then is how much the paint had dried between review 1 and review 2. I couldn't believe it - and it is just what I wanted. I've seen it now by (cloudy) morning light and it is still beautiful. I was looking for what I keep calling the color of a clear stream of water or the color of glass and noone could understand what I meant and I couldn't define it well, either. And yet! Now I have it.

Don't sweat F&B Borrowed Light. Christmas and family are much more important. I only wanted to know if you'd seen it and had an opinion.

Have a Very Happy Christmas and a Wonderful New Year in your New nearly completed home! How is Farrow Cream after application 3?

Hi Mindstorm:

I just logged on to tell you that I can't fined Borrowed Light in my F&B fandex. I wonder if it's a new color, my fandex is three years old afterall. That thing is such a pita, it's not organized by number, or alphabetical, or by color or anything that I can figure out. But I can't find it. After the holidays I can run by the paint store and see it there. They have big color cards there so I'll be able to get a better feeling for it anyway.

I am SO HAPPY that you love the color so much!! Yes, it does change as it dries, and I found (in my bathroom anyway) that it was also slightly different a few days later. I guess it cures or something. Didn't happen as much with the foyer/hallway (although the two coat difference was amazing there).

Merry Christmas to you too and Happy New Year to you and yours! We are actually going to make Christmas breakfast as the first meal on our Lacanche, even though the kitchen STILL isn't finished. I can't wait.

All the best,
Ivette

P.S. Oh! I just finished coat number 3 on Farrow's Cream and it is much MUCH better. I'm still not over the moon in love, but I like it very much indeed, and I think it's going to be beautiful once all my stuff is in there.

Mindstorm,
This is probably too late and irrelevant, but my master is painted a lovely soft blue-grey called SW Comfort Gray (grey?). I don't have a ton of natural light so I wanted soft not too dark.I just searched my photos, but the only one I have shows it as BLUE and it isn't. Also our sitting room ceiling is a beautiful blue/gray even paler, but I can't find my list #*!

jillypie,
Thanks so much! I'll check out SW Comfort Grey tomorrow. Thanks to Ivette, I've now got an actual paint piece to compare it against instead of groping in the dark. We have a north light into the room - north-east and north-west to be precise - and that has made selecting colors most difficult. We do have the daylight reveal bulb business in the room but even so there is a BIG BIG BIG difference in the daytime light and the nighttime light and it shows up royally in the room color. No problem if the room color is still pleasant in all these lights of course - its when the dodgier colors show up that it gets difficult! That is why C2's Icefog is having to exit stage right after not even a year in the room. It is okay during the day but looks like tennis club changing rooms, at night.

MIndstorm, our light is north and northeast. I am going to the house today and will look up the other color I mentioned. Good luck with the Comfort Grey.

"tennis club changing rooms"???? OMG. Yep, it has got to go.

:)
Ivette

Mindstorm,
I have forgotten the name but the color,SW6210 is a beautiful pale, pale blue-grey .I used it on the ceiling.

That SW6210 is called "Windowpane."

So mindstorm, what color did you end up with? How did it turn out?
Happy New Year, by the way.

So I'm here to update all on my paint extravaganza.

Jillypie, thanks for the SW references but I could not find WindowPane or the 6000 series at our SW stores at all. I've been really pretty occupied at work so I couldn't fish out another SW store to try. So, since I had absolutely LOVED DK-24, I decided to go for it.

The big sample boards of DK-24 gave me the "water color" thing that I was looking for.

Now, after a whole series of mishaps (later), I eventually got DK24 on the walls. I verified when I got the paint that it matched my sample (based on the sample pot I'd previously ordered). Strangely, it didn't match it perfectly but regardless, I still loved the color of the sample board I painted up. OK, so on it went on the walls. We had applied 2 coats of white primer to hide that god-awful C2-Icefog. Two coats of DK-24 later, guess what, I've got a pale pink room! Ugh! These full-spectrum colors absolutely suck, I tell you!

Seriously, I could not see where this mauve was coming from no matter how hard I looked at the sample boards. But then I realized, if you/I put your hands around your eyes so that all I see is the color of the wall directly in front of me - I see my pale blue. But the peripheral vision catches the color that is being obliquely reflected off the wall - there's the mauve. And sure enough, if I look at one edge of my sample board (I painted up a 2.5' x 1.5' - that's foot not inches - sample boards) I'm seeing blue but my peripheral vision is sees the mauve or pale violet from the further edge of the sample board.

Now, although this is a very very pale color, I'm not sure I can live in a pink/mauve room - even if it is a pink tinted white. Because of the paleness, while this is an improvement over the Icefog, the color is not. I'm not sure but I think I may be about to hurt something LOL!

The worst of this is that the sample thing of DK-24 is EXACTLY the color I was looking for. Really! Pirula hit the color smack dab on the head. Now, it is reaching ridiculous proportions for me to paint this bloody room one more time but I've briefly considered getting Pratt and Lambert of Ben Moore to color match the DK-24 - because I DON'T want all those non-blue/gray colors from DK24! Think that'll work? :-)

I must confess, something I have not done yet although the paint will have been on the walls for a week today, is see what the wall looks like in daylight. I've only been able to see it in artificial light - under direct incidence it does look a pale blue but the rest of the room looks mauve, and in the pale early morning light - blue on one spot of one wall, mauve for the rest of the room, and pale yellow on another wall which faces a west-facing window. The pale yellow just looks dirty to me, and although the mauve bit doesn't look dirty, it isn't anything I like. Of course, the thing that is making me laugh and cry at the same time is: I can't believe I have a fr@&king pink room! After the huge fuss I used to create as a child when my mom wanted me to dress up in some lacy pink thing, I think I'll be laughing stock of the family if they come to my house and see that of all the colors of the spectrum - my bedroom is pink! Of course, other than blue, gray or white, I truly don't think I can think of another color I would not mind having on the walls. Truly, I can't.

mindstorm, might I suggest that before repainting you switch out the incandescent bulbs. Try the GE Reveal or the Verilux bulbs which have whiter light if you don't already have them. It might help take away some of the mauvre aura. If not, well, then you know.

Rococogurl, You know, you're right about the lights. That is one thing that we really do need to sort out in more than one room in the house. In this room, we have two uplight floor lamps: one has a GE Reveal and puts out a nice light but is quite low wattage, and the other is a halogen which puts out a good amount of light (enough to read with) but I don't really care for the spectrum. The incandescent can't take a higher wattage bulb and it has a really spot-light sort of uplight - old cheap lamps that really do need to be improved.

HOWEVER, that was one of the reasons I really wanted to see the room in the natural light - to see if it is the bad light from our poor grade lamps or if the color itself is unlivable with. Sadly, I took off for England on Thursday so I was away over the weekend which is when I usually get to check out the natural light in my house. Got back Monday night and the room was still mauve-pink ;-)

That said, today really was a red letter day. This morning was C-O-L-D in Boston - 10degrees at 7:something in the AM so I figured I'd hang back a bit longer before heading in to work thinking that the sun may warm things up a bit more. Well, the happy side effect of that was that I got to see the room in much brighter natural light than I ever have before.

Ready for this? It is not a pink room in good natural light! In fact, it is a beautiful color! Oh, it is a white, don't get me wrong. BUT, I see pale blue predominate, and through that I see green splotches, I see a pale brown or yellow or something splotch, and yes I see my mauve. BUT, I can handle bits of all these other colors because that is not the predominant color in the room. The splotches of color - well, okay, not really: I really should say: "splotches of hints of color" are really something else. Half the time it seemed like I've wandered into the hallway or a spare bedroom where there really are splotches of paint all over the place. It was most descidedly a euphoric morning, I have to say. No pink room, a beautiful white-blue room with loads of random effects around the place. It sounds psychadelic or an LSD-induced, but it is not because the room is really a white room. BUT there is this very pale rainbow that you can see throughout the walls of this basically white-blue walled room. I loved what I saw this AM.

So, if I can recreate this sort of lighting with a good set of lamps, I'll be happy. That said, that was probably part of my issue with the C2-Icefog. It was an okay color during the day - nothing I particularly loved because I basically was looking for a pale nearly-white room - but it was quite awful at night, probably thanks to my lights. So, I don't feel badly about changing it out, but I can say that probably shouldn't malign C2 for creating Icefog nearly as much as I have in the past ;-).

That said, this color search was quite a ride! However, what I have learned after sampling paints from virtually every "good"/FS/6-8-10-16colorant brand known to man is that DK has wonderful whites. I'll probably still go to these guys and of course the trusted Benjamin Moore for any future paint adventures and hope for much less drama. And of course FPE for "other" stuff (I am still enamoured of my British Racing Green front door.)

So to summarize this long post:
(1) Rococogurl, you're right. I need better lamps in there that I can put the Full Spectrum and Reveal bulbs into.
(2) I saw the room in good light (well, till 8:10 this am) and it was finally a beaut! I can cancel that subscription to Betty Ford's or whoever cures you of mental illnesses.

Progress is a good thing! Good color in the morning and perhaps improved at night with a bulb switch vs a paint switch. Perhaps this will simply become a lamp issue. Would make time for other rooms. LOL.

Hey Mindstorm & Rococo...,
Whew! I'm tired after reading your posts!! (hee-hee. guess I'm being a brat now... ;-) !!

I kinda LIKE Icefog! To me, it's kind of a pale-blue/minty color. I haven't made it for any clients yet, but I'm sure I will! I'll have to check the formula tomorrow.

Have a goood one,
Faron

OMG! WHERE have I been???

This is unbelievable. That DKC stuff is on crack, it really is. My DKC #16, as I know I've said a million times is silvery gray during the daylight hours and tannish taupe at night. Good thing I like them both.

I'm glad you like it in the end mindstorm, but man alive!

Ivette