Lately I've been painting the interior of our house. You may recall that I've been building this house since before I even started this blog -- which is to say, before time began. The house is finally nearing completion, and I've been trying to get it painted so that we can move in our furniture and tiki dolls and whatnot.
We painted most of the interior a light sage green color. When people see it, they invariably say, "Ooh, I like that color. What's it called?"
And I tell them, "Tuscan Hills."
Don't go looking for "Tuscan Hills" at Home Depot, though, because Mrs. Diesel and I made it up. So if you ask the guy in the paint department for that color, he will just stare blankly at you as if you had asked him... well, any other question, actually.
The standard way of picking a paint color is to go to the paint store, grab a bunch of postage stamp-sized color swatches with uncannily descriptive names like "Autumn Mist" or "Monterrey Fog," and then take them home and hold them up against a wall. If you're smart, you hold the swatch up against several different walls at several different times of the day, so that you can see what it would look like to hold a postage stamp against several different walls at several different times of the day.
Then begins the delicate process of color negotiation. It seems that your wife likes "Autumn Mist," but you prefer "Monterrey Fog," so you discuss the relative merits of each for several hours, break for some hot color-selection sex, and eventually end up compromising on something halfway between your respective preferences, like "Irish Breeze."
So you paint your whole house "Irish Breeze," after which you and your wife agree a better name for the color would have been "Monkey Vomit." But you pretend to like it, and you tell yourself that you're going to want to paint again anyway after the kids go away to college in fourteen years.
This method works remarkably well for most people, but here's my problem: I'm rather tall, and as a result many of the rooms in my house are significantly larger than a postage stamp. Some of the rooms, in fact, are the size of several dozen postage stamps. I do my best to picture those color swatches tiling my walls, but even my imagination has its limits. The only way I can know for sure whether I like a color is to paint a sizable portion of a wall that color. But then what do you do if you don't like the color? Buy another color, right? And what if you don't like that one? Eventually, even if you just buy a quart at a time, you end up going through a lot of paint until you finally give up and settle on something that you tell yourself is, if nothing else, not as bad as the sixteen quarts of stuff slowly hardening into big globs of latex in your garage.
Twelve years ago, Mrs. Diesel and I were faced with the challenge of painting our first house, and we made the mistake of asking the guy in the paint department of Sears for advice. We followed him as he wandered through the paint aisle making painfully obvious paint-related observations. He would dispense helpful tidbits like the fact "off white" isn't quite the same as white, and that semi-gloss paint isn't as shiny as gloss paint. To this day Mrs. Diesel and I can't walk through the paint department of any store without one of us remarking, in the manner of the Sears Paint Guy, "This here is kids' paint. It's good for kids' rooms."
The fact is, painting isn't rocket science. Other than picking the right finish*, the only important decision to make is regarding the color. And here's something I realized in kindergarten, when my teacher let me in on a little secret she called the "color wheel": There's nothing magical about making "Autumn Mist" or "Monkey Vomit." Every color is just a spot on the color wheel.
A little color primer (ha!) for those of you who skipped kindergarten: There are only three variables that go into making a color: Hue, saturation and lightness.**
A couple of years ago, my father-in-law wanted to paint the interior of his house. I have a paint sprayer, so I told him that if he got the paint, I'd paint it. He went and got ten gallons of paint, so I set up the sprayer and popped open the lid of one of the buckets.
Now I should mention that my father-in-law -- whom I call Opie, for reasons I won't go into here -- is a nice guy, but he's not the most practical person in the world. Opie sometimes makes decisions that seem to defy common sense.
"Wow," I said, regarding the substance shimmering at me from the five gallon bucket in front of me. "Do you really want to paint your house the color of a Thin Mint Blizzard?"
He looked at the paint and just shrugged, unable -- or unwilling -- to imagine what that color was going to look like on his walls.
There's a color called "institutional green" that is used in insane asylums because it supposedly has a soothing effect on the inmates. I don't know how effective it is, but I have no doubt that a good lawyer could mount a pretty successful murder defense based on the defendant's excessive exposure to Thin Mint Blizzard. "Yes, your honor, my client killed those seventeen people, but look at the color of his living room!"
I painted a little Thin Mint Blizzard on Opie's living room wall. It was even more garish and horrific than I had pictured. Just that four foot square section of TMB on his wall made me want to go on a murderous rampage and then burn down a Dairy Queen.
"Shit," said Opie. Because you can't return ten gallons of Thin Mint Blizzard.
Fortunately for Opie, I have mad color blending skillz. I went to our barn and grabbed several cans of leftover paint.
First, I added some red. If you're a girl -- or a boy with bad acne -- you know what happens when you mix red and green. If you put some of that green coverup stuff on a big red blotch on your forehead, the red blotch will magically disappear -- although the underlying cause is still something you should probably see a physician about. (I'm not normally one to advocate that males wear makeup, but seriously, if you're a guy between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, get some of that green stuff. I wish I had known about that stuff when I was in high school.) Anyway, that stuff works because red and green are complimentary colors, so they cancel each other out. By the same principle, if you add a little red to a particularly garish shade of green, it will nicely take the edge off.
Next I added a bunch of white, to make the color a little lighter. The problem with adding white, though, is that it turns colors into pastels. So unless you're going for an Easter themed house, you also need to add a little black to bring down the saturation and lightness a bit.
I tweaked it a bit more, eventually ending up with ten gallons of a nice sage green, which, now that I think about it, is where I always end up. I'm not actually sure that this method works for any other color.
In any case, Opie was quite happy to have his house painted something in the ballpark of Tuscan Hills rather than Thin Mint Blizzard -- and without having to buy any more paint.
These days when I want to paint something, I go to the paint store and buy just those five colors. I usually buy five gallons of white and just a gallon (or maybe only a quart) of each of the others. I mix paint until I get something I like. Then I paint a little on a wall to see what it looks like. If it's too intense, I add some gray (white + black, in case you're not sure) or a complimentary color. This is how I painted our last two houses.
One caveat about this method: If you go to Home Depot and ask the guy in the paint department for "yellow," he'll look at you as if... well, he'll give you that look we talked about earlier. Despite the fact that yellow is one of the three primary colors that make up all other possible colors, you can't just buy "yellow." You see, the Home Depot guys don't know anything about how colors actually work. They don't know the magic of the color wheel, because they were pulled out of kindergarten to go to a special school for future Home Depot employees. All they know is that to make "Sandusky Tan," they press the buttons to make the machine add 8 units of RAW UMBER and 3 units of LAMP BLACK to a white base. They're pretty much color-retarded.
To keep the Home Depot guy from freaking out, you have to go pick out something like "Flame Yellow" or "Lighthouse Blue" and hand the postage stamp thing to him. He will see the comforting color formula on the postage stamp thing and mix it up for you like the dutiful color-mixing monkey he is. Nevermind that to make "Flame Yellow," all he's doing is adding 17 units of something called PERM YELLOW to white paint. You still can't just ask him for yellow, because he will pull his Construction Sign Orange apron (PERM YELLOW 17, EXTERIOR RED 10) over his head and sob uncontrollably until they cart him off to someplace painted with Institutional Green (PERM YELLOW 14, THALO BLUE 9, LAMP BLACK 6).
And it's not just Home Depot. I sent Mrs. Diesel to our local Ace hardware store a few days ago to get "yellow." She knows, of course, that you can't buy yellow at an Ace hardware store, because even though their employees are culled from a slightly deeper gene pool than Home Depot's, they have been specifically instructed not to acknowledge the existence of primary colors, because doing so would cheapen the art of Fancy Color Naming. So Mrs. Diesel picked the brightest yellow she could find, and asked for a gallon of it.
The Ace dude told her that such a bright color required a more expensive base -- and I'm sure there's a reason for that, assuming that the customer actually intended to paint something that shade of yellow. Of course, you can't tell the Ace dude that you have no intention of actually painting anything with the paint you're purchasing, because then they will assume that you are insane and start talking to you in the voice they reserve for the guy who is building Jacob's Ladder out of PVC pipe. Mrs. Diesel called to ask whether I wanted the more expensive base, and rather than make her fight the Ace dude over what we could or couldn't do with paint, I told her to just get the brightest yellow that they offered in the cheaper base. So the Ace dude happily complied, adding the Ace version of PERM YELLOW along with WHITE to a white base. Yes, despite the fact that all we wanted was yellow, the machine told him that he needed to add some more white to the white, so he did it. Whatever. It was yellow enough for my purposes.
So if you're about to embark on a painting project, don't be duped into thinking that you're limited to choosing between postage stamps labeled "Nantucket Moss" or "Cambridge Lichen." Your options are as limitless as the color spectrum and your imagination. And if you need help, just let me know. I can make any color there is. As long as it's pretty close to "Tuscan Hills" (BROWN OXIDE 2, GREEN OXIDE 20, LAMP BLACK 7).
*Ok, yes, I did once take a painting job in college where I accidentally painted the ceilings of an entire apartment in gloss paint, so that it resembled a cave. But I was only 22 at the time.
**Yes, I know, your kindergarten teacher told you that you could make any color with the three primary colors. Technically this is true, because black is actually the absence of color. You wouldn't need white if you were working with photons rather than paint; in physics you can combine red, yellow and blue to make white, but with paint it just makes monkey vomit.
***It gets a little complicated because these factors are all interrelated. For example, by adding purple to yellow, you change the hue, but you also slightly lower the saturation and lightness. It just takes a little practice to get the hang of it.
We painted most of the interior a light sage green color. When people see it, they invariably say, "Ooh, I like that color. What's it called?"
And I tell them, "Tuscan Hills."
Don't go looking for "Tuscan Hills" at Home Depot, though, because Mrs. Diesel and I made it up. So if you ask the guy in the paint department for that color, he will just stare blankly at you as if you had asked him... well, any other question, actually.
The standard way of picking a paint color is to go to the paint store, grab a bunch of postage stamp-sized color swatches with uncannily descriptive names like "Autumn Mist" or "Monterrey Fog," and then take them home and hold them up against a wall. If you're smart, you hold the swatch up against several different walls at several different times of the day, so that you can see what it would look like to hold a postage stamp against several different walls at several different times of the day.
Then begins the delicate process of color negotiation. It seems that your wife likes "Autumn Mist," but you prefer "Monterrey Fog," so you discuss the relative merits of each for several hours, break for some hot color-selection sex, and eventually end up compromising on something halfway between your respective preferences, like "Irish Breeze."
So you paint your whole house "Irish Breeze," after which you and your wife agree a better name for the color would have been "Monkey Vomit." But you pretend to like it, and you tell yourself that you're going to want to paint again anyway after the kids go away to college in fourteen years.
This method works remarkably well for most people, but here's my problem: I'm rather tall, and as a result many of the rooms in my house are significantly larger than a postage stamp. Some of the rooms, in fact, are the size of several dozen postage stamps. I do my best to picture those color swatches tiling my walls, but even my imagination has its limits. The only way I can know for sure whether I like a color is to paint a sizable portion of a wall that color. But then what do you do if you don't like the color? Buy another color, right? And what if you don't like that one? Eventually, even if you just buy a quart at a time, you end up going through a lot of paint until you finally give up and settle on something that you tell yourself is, if nothing else, not as bad as the sixteen quarts of stuff slowly hardening into big globs of latex in your garage.
Twelve years ago, Mrs. Diesel and I were faced with the challenge of painting our first house, and we made the mistake of asking the guy in the paint department of Sears for advice. We followed him as he wandered through the paint aisle making painfully obvious paint-related observations. He would dispense helpful tidbits like the fact "off white" isn't quite the same as white, and that semi-gloss paint isn't as shiny as gloss paint. To this day Mrs. Diesel and I can't walk through the paint department of any store without one of us remarking, in the manner of the Sears Paint Guy, "This here is kids' paint. It's good for kids' rooms."The fact is, painting isn't rocket science. Other than picking the right finish*, the only important decision to make is regarding the color. And here's something I realized in kindergarten, when my teacher let me in on a little secret she called the "color wheel": There's nothing magical about making "Autumn Mist" or "Monkey Vomit." Every color is just a spot on the color wheel.
A little color primer (ha!) for those of you who skipped kindergarten: There are only three variables that go into making a color: Hue, saturation and lightness.**
- Hue refers where the color falls on the color wheel, from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to violet.
- Saturation basically means how intense the color is. Adding white or black (or gray) to a color lowers the saturation. You can also lower the saturation by adding a complimentary color. For example, to decrease the saturation of a bright red, you could add green (yellow + blue).
- Lightness means how bright the color is. Adding white increases lightness; adding black reduces lightness.
A couple of years ago, my father-in-law wanted to paint the interior of his house. I have a paint sprayer, so I told him that if he got the paint, I'd paint it. He went and got ten gallons of paint, so I set up the sprayer and popped open the lid of one of the buckets.
Now I should mention that my father-in-law -- whom I call Opie, for reasons I won't go into here -- is a nice guy, but he's not the most practical person in the world. Opie sometimes makes decisions that seem to defy common sense."Wow," I said, regarding the substance shimmering at me from the five gallon bucket in front of me. "Do you really want to paint your house the color of a Thin Mint Blizzard?"
He looked at the paint and just shrugged, unable -- or unwilling -- to imagine what that color was going to look like on his walls.
There's a color called "institutional green" that is used in insane asylums because it supposedly has a soothing effect on the inmates. I don't know how effective it is, but I have no doubt that a good lawyer could mount a pretty successful murder defense based on the defendant's excessive exposure to Thin Mint Blizzard. "Yes, your honor, my client killed those seventeen people, but look at the color of his living room!"
I painted a little Thin Mint Blizzard on Opie's living room wall. It was even more garish and horrific than I had pictured. Just that four foot square section of TMB on his wall made me want to go on a murderous rampage and then burn down a Dairy Queen.
"Shit," said Opie. Because you can't return ten gallons of Thin Mint Blizzard.
Fortunately for Opie, I have mad color blending skillz. I went to our barn and grabbed several cans of leftover paint.
First, I added some red. If you're a girl -- or a boy with bad acne -- you know what happens when you mix red and green. If you put some of that green coverup stuff on a big red blotch on your forehead, the red blotch will magically disappear -- although the underlying cause is still something you should probably see a physician about. (I'm not normally one to advocate that males wear makeup, but seriously, if you're a guy between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, get some of that green stuff. I wish I had known about that stuff when I was in high school.) Anyway, that stuff works because red and green are complimentary colors, so they cancel each other out. By the same principle, if you add a little red to a particularly garish shade of green, it will nicely take the edge off.Next I added a bunch of white, to make the color a little lighter. The problem with adding white, though, is that it turns colors into pastels. So unless you're going for an Easter themed house, you also need to add a little black to bring down the saturation and lightness a bit.
I tweaked it a bit more, eventually ending up with ten gallons of a nice sage green, which, now that I think about it, is where I always end up. I'm not actually sure that this method works for any other color.
In any case, Opie was quite happy to have his house painted something in the ballpark of Tuscan Hills rather than Thin Mint Blizzard -- and without having to buy any more paint.
These days when I want to paint something, I go to the paint store and buy just those five colors. I usually buy five gallons of white and just a gallon (or maybe only a quart) of each of the others. I mix paint until I get something I like. Then I paint a little on a wall to see what it looks like. If it's too intense, I add some gray (white + black, in case you're not sure) or a complimentary color. This is how I painted our last two houses.
One caveat about this method: If you go to Home Depot and ask the guy in the paint department for "yellow," he'll look at you as if... well, he'll give you that look we talked about earlier. Despite the fact that yellow is one of the three primary colors that make up all other possible colors, you can't just buy "yellow." You see, the Home Depot guys don't know anything about how colors actually work. They don't know the magic of the color wheel, because they were pulled out of kindergarten to go to a special school for future Home Depot employees. All they know is that to make "Sandusky Tan," they press the buttons to make the machine add 8 units of RAW UMBER and 3 units of LAMP BLACK to a white base. They're pretty much color-retarded.
To keep the Home Depot guy from freaking out, you have to go pick out something like "Flame Yellow" or "Lighthouse Blue" and hand the postage stamp thing to him. He will see the comforting color formula on the postage stamp thing and mix it up for you like the dutiful color-mixing monkey he is. Nevermind that to make "Flame Yellow," all he's doing is adding 17 units of something called PERM YELLOW to white paint. You still can't just ask him for yellow, because he will pull his Construction Sign Orange apron (PERM YELLOW 17, EXTERIOR RED 10) over his head and sob uncontrollably until they cart him off to someplace painted with Institutional Green (PERM YELLOW 14, THALO BLUE 9, LAMP BLACK 6).
And it's not just Home Depot. I sent Mrs. Diesel to our local Ace hardware store a few days ago to get "yellow." She knows, of course, that you can't buy yellow at an Ace hardware store, because even though their employees are culled from a slightly deeper gene pool than Home Depot's, they have been specifically instructed not to acknowledge the existence of primary colors, because doing so would cheapen the art of Fancy Color Naming. So Mrs. Diesel picked the brightest yellow she could find, and asked for a gallon of it.
The Ace dude told her that such a bright color required a more expensive base -- and I'm sure there's a reason for that, assuming that the customer actually intended to paint something that shade of yellow. Of course, you can't tell the Ace dude that you have no intention of actually painting anything with the paint you're purchasing, because then they will assume that you are insane and start talking to you in the voice they reserve for the guy who is building Jacob's Ladder out of PVC pipe. Mrs. Diesel called to ask whether I wanted the more expensive base, and rather than make her fight the Ace dude over what we could or couldn't do with paint, I told her to just get the brightest yellow that they offered in the cheaper base. So the Ace dude happily complied, adding the Ace version of PERM YELLOW along with WHITE to a white base. Yes, despite the fact that all we wanted was yellow, the machine told him that he needed to add some more white to the white, so he did it. Whatever. It was yellow enough for my purposes.
So if you're about to embark on a painting project, don't be duped into thinking that you're limited to choosing between postage stamps labeled "Nantucket Moss" or "Cambridge Lichen." Your options are as limitless as the color spectrum and your imagination. And if you need help, just let me know. I can make any color there is. As long as it's pretty close to "Tuscan Hills" (BROWN OXIDE 2, GREEN OXIDE 20, LAMP BLACK 7).
*Ok, yes, I did once take a painting job in college where I accidentally painted the ceilings of an entire apartment in gloss paint, so that it resembled a cave. But I was only 22 at the time.
**Yes, I know, your kindergarten teacher told you that you could make any color with the three primary colors. Technically this is true, because black is actually the absence of color. You wouldn't need white if you were working with photons rather than paint; in physics you can combine red, yellow and blue to make white, but with paint it just makes monkey vomit.
***It gets a little complicated because these factors are all interrelated. For example, by adding purple to yellow, you change the hue, but you also slightly lower the saturation and lightness. It just takes a little practice to get the hang of it.
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| posted by Diesel at Wednesday, September 17, 2008 |
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