Photo by Karin Dalziel.
While it might be a bit extreme for many people, the reasoning is that when you leave swatches on the wall, you can see how they react to light throughout the day and weed out colours as you go along. They also suggest taking samples from a variety of shades for each colour to increase the chances you’ll pick something you don’t want to immediately paint over.
How Do You Choose a Paint Color? [Apartment Therapy]
Max
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 9:49 AMThis seems like common sense… isn’t this the whole point of paint samples?
Graeme
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 3:02 PMMy wife confirmed that I don’t really care too much which colour we chose by using paint samples. She had about 8 different shades of white (barley white, papyrus white, parrot puke white or whatever wanky names they give them) and painted large squares of them on one wall. Just as I was leaving for work she asked which one I preferred. I knew not to just point at one and say “that one” so I spent a minute or two pretending to think about it and chose the one at the bottom right then went off to work.
When I came home she asked me if I was sure of my choice, so naturally I pointed to the one at the bottom right and said “yep, that one definitely, it still looks the best of the lot.”
Little did I know that the sneaky sod had painted over all the original squares in a different order!
6 months after all that grief the wall that was painted in the painfully chosen shade of white had a full height and full length bookcase installed against it. The wall could be fluorescent green and you wouldn’t know.