Monday, January 15, 2007

Choosing Colors

I'm hoping to get my bedroom painted sometime in the next couple months. However, I'm having a tough time selecting a color. Right now the ceiling and top half of the walls are sort of a buttery yellow and the bottom half of the walls are a bluish-purple, with the two colors separated by a wallpaper border of flowers and ribbons incorporating both colors against a white background. There is white carpet and white battenburg lace valances over the windows. The whole thing is MUCH too Martha Stewart looking for my tastes. So I'm ready to pick something new. However, after looking at dozens of paint chips I'm baffled about what to try next.

The fact that the room is 18 x 20 with 14' vaulted ceilings makes painting the place a bit of a challenge...but also makes it that much more important to me. That's A LOT of yellow right now and I just don't care for it.

It's amazing how much color can influence mood. I read once about a jail that painted all their cells a certain shade of pink because it was supposed to be "calming".

I definitely don't want pink.

I'm looking at several shades of beige, sage green, and about 47 different colors of white. I'm thinking I want very neutral background and then may do a bold mural all across the one high wall and part of the ceiling.

Or I may do some sort of sponge-paint or feather-paint to give the walls a textured look. Dunno...

But this yellow definitely has go to go.

If it were just up to me I'd probably paint one wall a very BOLD color and then some quieter color to complement on the rest of the room. But hubby dearest isn't crazy about that idea. Last time I tried somethng BOLD I slected "Library Red" for the office nook under our stairs. My beloved decided after it was done that it looked like a murder scene - the color conjured up images of dried blood for him every time he went there, so he painted over it with some neutral beige. Based on that experience, I probably won't want to go with anything quite so dramatic this time. But I definitely want some WAKE UP AND SEE ME color in there somewhere.

What sort of colors do you like?

2 comments:

layne (herman) said...

We may have told you, but the red, yellow, orange and green colour choices in our living room were inspired by reading I was doing about India....

For our bedroom I told Juliana to think Gypsy and read her a brief excerpt from the book Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins that talks about beets. So far no painting has occured in the bedroom, but that still remains my inspiration for the room.

Have fun, it is just paint.

On a side note: I would like the job of being the person who gets to name different colours. I wonder how one goes about applying for that job...

Belladonna said...

Yeah, naming colors would be cool.

A few years ago the Crayola Crayon company introduced a a handful of new colors. They had a big promotional contest where people were invited to come up with names for the new hues. Those names that were selected were printed on the crayon wrappers along with the name and ages of the person who came up with the names. The new color names included stuff like "Macaroni and Cheese", "purple mountain majesty" and "tickle me pink" to name a few.

Most Crayola crayon color names are taken from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Bureau of Standards book called "Color: Universal Language and Dictionary of Names." Many crayon names are also borrowed from traditional artists' paints.

However, I would love to see some colors named by Papa Herman!

For more intriguing Crayon trivia, Click HERE

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