April 6, 2017
Do You Have A Paint Color Mistake? Have you ever taken someone else’s advice, knowing full well that it wasn’t right, yet you went right on and did it anyway? In your gut, you knew it and as you beat yourself up, you ask, “I knew better. Why did I do that?”
Well, I did not follow my own advice when I painted our master bedroom en-suite several years ago! A well-known person with her own signature paints offered chips with coordinating colors on them. I brought one of them home and decided to paint my ceiling a bold gold color and the walls a green from her color suggestions on that chip. Even though I had reservations, she was way more famous than I and all of her experts knew better than I, right?
Don’t get me wrong. They are both beautiful colors, but the saturation of color in the paint on the ceiling is more than the paint on the walls. It has always felt a little wrong. For an earlier post click here► For a foolproof way to choose your Paint colors. Or click here for another post you might like ►No Fear Paint Selection.
Seriously, the rest of my home is painted with beautiful colors following this method. I would not change one of them! If I have to paint again, I would probably choose the same colors. Do you love your color choices that much? If you choose your colors from something you love, how can you go wrong?
I have loved the way the afternoon sun poured in the half round window at the peak of the vaulted ceiling on the west wall and illuminated the golden color. I loved the green on the walls more. It’s kind of like being enveloped in a meadow.
The two colors ‘together’ have bothered me for a long time! You could see the ceiling had a lot more saturation of color and at certain times of the day, it was unsettling. It’s amazing how different the colors on the walls and ceiling look at different times of the day.
The photo above is a relatively good representation of the gold color. (It’s hard to get a perfect match with a camera and the computer.) It is a little garish next to the softer green and the paler color, isn’t it?
Don’t you love vaulted ceilings? Physically painting vaulted ceilings is not something I particularly love. So I lived with it for a while.
When we were working on the bathroom/dressing area, I finally decided to fix the problem. The paint color we chose for the bathroom, Autumn Blond from Sherwin Williams, is the new color for the ceiling in the bedroom and the dressing area, but in a flat finish.
You may be thinking that the Autumn Blond color is just a neutral. It is, but I could have chosen any color on the fan with that same depth of color and it would have looked better than that stark gold. You can see that the green and the wheat have white added. They have a softness about them. Clearly, the gold doesn’t.
Paint Color Cross-Pollination
Remember in an earlier post how we cross-pollinate adjoining rooms by painting the wall color on the ceiling of the adjoining room and vice versa? Please don’t tell me you still have all white ceilings! If you have color on the wall, you will love the color on the ceilings! You can paint it the same color as the wall and it will look a shade lighter.
If you want the ceiling to look even lighter, you can skip up or down one, (depending on your fan), on the same card to a lighter tint of the wall color.
If you want it to look darker, you will have to skip up or down, (depending on your fan), on the color fan and choose a step darker paint. If you have tall ceilings and want them to look a little lower, you can visually bring them down with paint. It will seem a little cozier, especially, if your ceilings are stark white!
In the picture below, from an earlier post, you can see that the ceiling is the original green color and the walls are the Autumn Blond, which is a color pulled from the new ceramic tile on the bathroom floor.
Yep, I love the new color! The garish gold is gone. I no longer look at the bedroom ceiling and wish I had painted it another color! The whole house is in color harmony.
This is an easy way to choose a perfect color for your next paint job. Would you like more posts on paint and color? Do you have a paint color mistake?
