COLOUR LIMITS: CHOOSING PAINT

Who would have thought that choosing paint colours would prove to be such a challenge.  I know what I want but I can't seem to find it anywhere.  Furthermore, I've learnt an important lesson: A paint colour swatch and what the paint looks like on the wall seem to be two different realities.  Sometimes it's quite alarming how something called Hay Bale ends up being more reminiscent of a tangerine. That's why it's always best to buy & try a colour tester before you commit yourself to an 10 litres of mistake that you may have to look at for a while.

Not a Kazimir Malevich artwork but the testing wall

 

If you are using wallpaper for a feature wall or a feature colour, you need to think about how this is going to tie in with the rest of your colour scheme and that includes flooring, furniture, upholstery etc.

Beiges, Creams and Hints of White seem to fall into various categories: Red hue, yellow hue, green hue, etc.  Some Off-Whites seem to be very off.  Dulux Almond white sadly seem to be more brown that white.  Overall I'm finding a lot of colours to be darker than they suggest. I prefer rooms to be light, bright and airy or elegantly muted in dusky pales.  B&Q's Soft Cream was really an Apricot trying hard to pass for a cream.  At the opposite end, Dulux Jasmine White seemed to be practically non-existent.  You have to look really hard to work out that it isn't white.

If walls had ears that would blush at the language used...

The bad photograph above doesn't reflect what's really going on here!   I'm hoping for Ivory walls with a muted green - somewhere between moss & olive as an accent colour or maybe something more vivid.  The feature wall will be papered to provide a textural finish.  The black lines represent picture frames.  Woodwork will be brilliant white. Will it work, who knows?

Take the rough with the smooth

Dulux Natural Calico for walls; suede-like wallpaper for the feature wall; with the inset back wall of the TV recess in a vivid purple (which mistakenly looks blue here).  The accent colour is a very small area and will also be echoed in the choice of fabric colours.

It's good to come back to your testing wall at various times of the day so you can see the paint in different light.  You also need to see how it will look at night with electric light.  Most importantly you need to think about the space:  Will it make the space appear smaller / larger / brighter / darker?  How will this colour effect my mood?   The rest is down to personal tastes...