Help! I Still Don’t Love My New Paint Colour

Interior Design by True Colour Expert Andrea Brooks

I usually don’t have time for a manicure until the day before my colour workshop begins.

Last Tuesday, I was in a nail salon in Tampa, chatting with the woman sitting next to me. She said she actually followed my blog because she was renovating her house. This is how our conversation went:

BM Edgecomb Gray Decor pad

I painted my walls Edgecomb gray but I’m not convinced that it’s the right colour.

ME: Have you re-decorated yet?

No

ME: That’s why you’re not convinced, this is a colour that sometimes looks beige, sometimes it looks green and sometimes it looks like the perfect neutral gray.

And sometimes it looks white, she said.

ME: Because you get a lot of light, I responded. And since you’re probably not redecorating with  earth tones, as long as that neutral doesn’t clash with your existing fixed elements, it’s probably perfect.

Thanks! That makes me feel so much better!

It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I’ve said it in this blog, so many people still think “If I just nail the paint colour” (no pun intended 🙂 “It’ll be downhill from there”.

A colour, like the dining room at the top of this post, is easier to love in an empty or undecorated room than a neutral.

Related post: Are you Waiting for your Paint Colour to Propose?

BM Edgecomb Gray Image source

I get a lot of skeptics in my classes who wonder how I can possibly choose paint colours not to mention, tile, countertops, and fabrics, on-line for my clients.

What they learn, is that getting colour right is way more about choosing the right undertones and way less about lighting. If you’ve chosen the correct undertone that works with all your furniture and your paint colour looks wrong at 11:00 am in the morning for 2 hours but it looks great all other times of the day, it’s easy to forgive that.

Maria’s Understanding Undertones Colour Wheel – The System

Designers will often explain away the wrong colour by blaming it on the light when really, they’ve just chosen the wrong neutral in the first place.

When they watch me walk through the nine undertones in class during our in-class exercises with hard finishes and fabrics, and see the difference between ‘meh’ and ‘wow that’s perfect’, well everything changes after that.

Related post: How to Choose Paint colours that Work with Your Lighting

True Colour Expert Training (learn more)

Seth Godin in his blog today said:

Education is the answer. Change what you know, change what you believe, and you change the actions. Learn to see, to understand, to have patience, and you learn to be the kind of person who can make a difference.

Educated people create other educated people. The standards go up when education is present, because the cost of being the least educated person in your tribe is high.

Very soon, in the design world, it will not be enough to be the designer who is still saying “Colour is hard, all you can do is test it and hope that you get it right”

There’s no hoping in my courses. You either get the colour right or you don’t. It’s no longer this mysterious, I’ll-never-wrap-my-arms-around-it phenomenon.

So if you’ve recently painted your walls and you are less-than-impressed? It’s probably more about the decorating that needs to happen next, and way less about the paint colour.

Related post: How Much Heavy Lifting can a Paint Colour Handle?

From Tampa, we drove to Sarasota this weekend for a little R&R. Then we fly to New Jersey on Monday afternoon, my Upper Montclair course starts Wednesday, there’s still two spots left if you want to jump in. Register here.