On and off for two weeks I‘ve been spending time painting several of the walls in my new studio. Because I still have jobs to shoot and orders to fulfill, I can’t spend all my time there getting things ready. So I pick and choose the days I can get there and try to make the most of the time that I do spend there. Which makes me all that much crazier when I feel like I’ve wasted time.
I was planning on the walls in my waiting area reflect the nice warm, inviting, chocolately brown that is prominent in my logo and web site and is consistent with my branding. As such, I proceeded down to the local Home Depot paint aisle and picked out a fantastic shade of paint called “Shaved Chocolate”. Now….seeing that there was the name “chocolate” in the title of this latex-infused pigmented wonder, you’d assume that the resulting painted wall would be a reasonable facsimilie of a chocolate-like color. I don’t know what corner of the world you are reading this from, but I have to assume if we all picked out a color that resembled chocolate, we’d all be pretty close.
As I watched the paint dry, I prayed to the God of Sherwin Williams that the color of the wall would indeed look better as it dried. Boy was I mistaken. For what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a color that was not Shaved Chocolate. If I had to describe it to my friends….and I did…it was Infant Diarrhea Brown. Now, for those of you without kids…Infant Diarrhea Brown would never be mistaken for Shaved Chocolate. No matter how late in the night the Infant Diarrhea Brown presented itself and no matter how badly you pleaded with your wife that it was ‘her turn’.
After assessing the situation, I knew that not only would my customers not like it, but it may cause many of the younger parents to rush out screaming with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One of the great things about paint aisles in big box stores is that they will often take back custom mixed paint that didn’t quite set the buyer’s world on fire. Over a year ago I purchased a gallon of one such paint. It was dark brown paint that I plucked from the Shelf of Mis-Fit Paints for $5, knowing that I could use it to paint backgrounds for my studio, or somewhere else. I precisely mixed in 14 Dixie cups full of this dark brown paint into what was left of my Infant Diarrhea Brown paint, magically transforming it into….Shaved Chocolate.
As I happily covered all evidence of the…let’s say it together…Infant Diarrhea Brown, I was pleasantly surprised at how perfect the color was. So I watched it dry. Just to be sure that it stayed perfect. And it did. And now I can move on to another area of the studio, with the knowledge that I need to stay away from colors that resemble anything you might find in a diaper or regurgitated on a bib. That being said, I may have to rethink the choice of Split Pea Soup in the sales room.
Great blog post Pat! Brown is seriously the hardest color to get right. Green can also be a challenge. One thing I have had success with (budget wise too) is to spend $3-5 on small samples of several colors of paint. I throw them up on my wall and watch them dry and am always shocked by which color I like best. It is often the one I grab as a "I'll never like this color" sample. Oh the joys of painting. Don't let the fumes go too much to your head and enjoy!
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