You bring home tons and tons of color chips, hold them up to your walls imagining what your walls will look like once this project is finally done. After days, weeks, months of trying to make a decision the weekend has come to paint or the painter’s cannot wait anymore for you to make a decision. You finally pick one just in the nick of time.
If your painting yourself/ yourselves, you may immediately notice that the color in the can that is hesitantly being rolled onto your walls is at least 2-3 shades lighter then the color chip.
Don’t panic, if its good paint it will get darker!
However if you find the paint is drying lighter that means its cheap paint. Cheap paint is clay based and that is why when your walls get specs of water or you try to clean them they have permanent discoloration/ water spots.
Now, after the walls are painted and you have allowed them to dry, your wall may still not look like the color chip.
Here’s why:
What time of day is it?
The lighting outside will greatly alter the way your new walls look. First of all, outside light has a blue cast which will alter the color. Also certain times of the day the light can completely wash out the colors on your wall depending on which way your windows are facing.
What kind of lighting do you use inside your house?
Most people use lights that cast yellow light in their space. This may make blues seem more green, greens look more neon and unsettling… if you painted what you thought was a nice mellow cheerful yellow, and it seems a lot more intense then you thought it would, its because the addition of bright yellow lighting. So change your bulbs to cleaner whiter light before you even start the process of picking a color and it will save you a lot of headaches.
Color is relative!
What colors dominate the room? You know, besides the new color on the wall you may be skeptical of right now, because that is going to alter the way your color appears on the wall. Did you paint with a safe beige color, but its looking pink? Do you have a lot of green things around the room? Green is the opposite of red, or in other words its compliment. So you may want to stay away from a beige with undertones of pink if you have a green sofa or many green accessories. Light bounces off of the green surfaces and onto the walls. The shinier the green surfaces the better the bounce and the more it will influence the walls. However, just the presence of the green in your field of vision will make you perceive the walls differently.
How can you tell if the beige color chip you picked out has a pink undertone? Hold a green chip next to it and see if you notice that it looks more pink. To see if it has a yellow undertone put a purple chip next to it, and so on. You should also take other beige color chips and you will see that this one is more green, this one is more pink, ect..
Paint Sheen
If its shiny (satin, semi-gloss) its going to reflect more light, and your color is going to appear lighter.
If its flat the color will be truer because the light is absorbed rather then bounced back. Flat paint will hide more imperfections in your wall as well. If your worried about scrub-ability, invest in a good paint like California Super Scrub and you can still have the benefits of a flat paint and the scrub- ability of a satin sheen.
Lastly
A paint chip is printed and made with completely different materials than actual paint.
It’s hard to imagine what a small color chip would look like on a larger scale.
When you look at a color chip it is usually right next to a darker or lighter version of it and that also influences the way you see the color. I suggest you cut it out of the strip and place it on a ‘white’ sheet of paper to get a better initial idea.
In my next blog I will cover the best way to go about getting paint samples and seeing the colors accurately.
