The fine art of painting...walls, that is.

I just painted our bedroom. Do you think there is some psychological connection to colour selection cuz I, ummm, just painted my bedroom in shades called milk chocolate and chocolate froth? Or perhaps my colour selections are entirely gastronomically related to my taste buds.


Really, I prefer chips to chocolate most of the time for snacking - although I'm not opposed to dipping my hand into the bag of chocolate chips for a quick pick me up. Funny though, I wasn't drawn to any potato chip coloured paint swatches. Come to think of it, I really didn't see any swatches called "sour cream and onion", "salt and vinegar" or one that I think would look great in the kitchen, "roast chicken."


When I was a kid, choosing paint was so much easier. If you wanted pink you went in and looked at the pink swatch - it had light pink, medium pink and dark pink. Wanted blue? How about light blue? Medium blue? Dark blue. Actually there were a couple of colours that were more definitively named. If you were a child of the 70s you might remember them - avocado green and harvest gold?


I have come up with a tried and true method of selecting paint colours. Choose the shade you really, really like, pay $35 for a gallon and come back the next day for the shade on the swatch that is two shades lighter than the shade you originally chose. Now that I've used this method a half dozen times I've progressed to the point where I skip the step where I buy the first gallon and immediately go for the two shades lighter choice.


Seriously, how can you tell from a 1" x 2" swatch of colour what a paint choice will look like in your room. Really, how was I to know that neon green would look so...well...neon-ish?


Another paint choosing tip. Remember that when you take in a small item to be colour matched (lets say, oh...how about a pillow with a teeny, tiny square of neon green) that the small item might not translate well to 180 square feet of walls.


And what about those lovely booklets with various rooms painted to showcase the current trends in colours? It has been my experience that if you don't have the furnishings, draperies, artwork, and other decorative touches pictured in the photos then your freshly painted room will still look like crap some one with no decorating talent lives there.


I'll leave you with a couple of photos of my current works of art.


The first one is Erin's room in shades of cotton candy. There is now a white chair rail installed (by moi!) at the point where the 2 colours meet. I'm pretty sure we don't have any chairs that will reach that high but we'll be ready if we ever get one!

This next room is Allie's funky new hang out. See the green???...Like it is hardly obvious! This is the 2 shades lighter green! Sometimes you may have to go 4 shades lighter. This photo is a bit dark so in case you can't tell the obvious colour palate is aqua, chocolate brown and lime green...but a light lime green. Haven't gotten curtains up yet so just pretend there are some lovely chocolate brown panels...putting that on my to do list this week along with 1,265, 984 other things.

By the way...anyone in need of 3/4 of a gallon of bright neon green paint (as opposed to the obviously (??) less bright 2 shades lighter neon green paint.)

And because this blog is also supposed to be about sharing some of my scrapbooking works of art here is a layout about Allie's new room. She's giving me the thumbs up so i must have done something right...not always the case around here. And to think she is only 9.