Smack some paint on there

[rinue]

Took Ciro to the airport very early in the morning and REL to the airport in the evening, around the time Mom and Dad got back from D.C.

I'm finally getting around to painting the bedroom and office - I finally have time, sort of, and no Ciro to occupy it. I bought sample pints of the colors that were the top contenders, and the bedroom paint is looking good. Our general idea for the bedroom was we wanted a black, but something with sophistication - nothing that would be too blackbox theater or too gloomy. Ciro and I both gravitated toward a Benjamin Moore paint called "Evening Dove" (don't search this online; it will not look anything like the paint), which is a velvety almost-black gray that looks deep blue-purple in daylight and has a lot of color depth to it. I'll put up another coat on the test area tomorrow and then live with it a couple more days, but I think it's pretty much a win.

The office color I'm less sure about. I expected this to be the easier color to find - I want, basically, a pale teal, but the pastel versions of that color look either juvenile or lurid if you keep them clean, and if you use a more broken version of the color it just looks like it used to be juvenile but yellowed as it faded. The color I have up now was my best bet, and I'm not loving it. The right accents and art might pull it together and make it seem less aggressively youthful - it looks interesting and exotic if I hold up saffron silks next to it, and it looks great with copper - but I'm not sure I want to invest that much time. I'll give it another coat and another few days to age, and think about it, and may go with another plan altogether. This room is so sun-filled it's hard to work with. I know that's supposed to be a boon to decorating, but I've always had an easier time with dark rooms.

Comments

[movingfinger]

"Evening Dove" sounds restful.

For the office, the color of the ambient light might be skewing your perception of the color on the walls, and the room with a lot of sun is going to appear substantially different under artificial lighting. The Martha Stewart palette and the Ralph Lauren palette have had some milky, duck-eggy blued-green kinds of colors, which may be what you want----not so much pastelness as, creaminess? (The Martha Stewart line can look like they're all meant for children's rooms, but you could start with a reference and try for something more intense.)

[rinue]

Yeah, the ambient light in here is tricky - it gets mostly shady eastern light, which tends to turn anything slightly blue to BLUE-full-stop. But then there's some western cross-light in the evenings. I've put a second coat on my test patch, and that's helping some - too much of the plaster white was coming through with one coat, and it was making the color a little less sure of itself than it could be. The Martha Stewart suggestion is a very good one; the color I'm looking for sounds like her kind of color.