Or I could just gouge my eyes out now...

[steuard]

If anyone out there has suggestions on how to choose decent paint colors for our living room and dining room, I'd really, really love to hear them. I've been staring at paint website color-picker tools for a while now, and not only are my eyes beginning to bug out but I keep feeling irritated when the user interfaces don't work quite the way I want them to. (Of course, what I really ultimately want from them would probably require black magic.)

The thing I really lack is a good way to make sure that I pick colors that look good together (including our existing dark blue couch). Kim and I would rather not default to generic neutral beige walls: we actually want some sort of color if we can manage it, though nothing too bright and bold.

Ideally, what I want is a tool that will let me build a palette one color at a time and gradually restrict my choices as I add additional colors to the list. I'd start with the couch color, which by itself probably wouldn't narrow the possibilities much, and then once I picked a second reasonable color (the main wall color, say) I'd be left with a much shorter list of possibilities for an additional accent color or two. Once I had a complete list, changing any one color would simultaneously update the others if necessary to keep the set looking good (unless a color was "locked", like the couch). In a perfect world, I could watch the effects of these changes in real time on a sample picture of a room similar to ours.

As noted, a tool like that probably doesn't exist, so at this point I'd be content with just general ideas on how to avoid major blunders while choosing colors by eye. I don't really trust my sense of style enough to risk a major painting excursion on it without some sort of outside support. (Kim has a better sense of these things than I do, but I very much want to be able to contribute intelligently to the conversation.)

Comments

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Why are you worried about it not matching if you can't tell when things don't match?

Ooooh, good question. [Behold, while I suck all the humor out of your comment by taking it entirely seriously.] I think the issue is less that I'm physiologically incapable of recognizing good design and more that I've never learned to recognize it consciously. I recognize its value enough to know that our choice of color scheme will have subtle effects on my mood and on my perception of the space in question, and I have very fuzzy notions of what some of those effects might be.

However, I have very limited skill in extrapolating from a few little paint samples (that look almost identical their cousins on the next sheet) to visualizing an entire room. Or maybe I do have a bit of skill at that but I don't trust it enough; I'm not sure. Either way, I end up feeling like I'm not up to the task at hand.

Also: be bold.

One of my favorite decorating schemes ever was in the house of a family friend in Nebraska. It was strikingly modern in a lot of ways: hard black and white colors on all the walls and furniture (maybe some chrome, too?), with a small number of items in absolutely vivid colors (a brilliant red glass vase sticks in my mind). I loved it... and I also felt convinced when looking at it that the look was fairly "fragile" to design changes: that is, someone with just a bit less talent for design could make it look comical rather than striking. Similarly, it also felt very "specific": the rooms decorated in that scheme wouldn't have worked if they included anything outside of its carefully chosen parameters.

So I know that I like bold choices, but I also know that given our current possessions and my level of design confidence I probably need to do something a bit less bold. At least this first time. We're still going to avoid doing it all in light neutral cream like the house I grew up in, though.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Aha! So room design is a non-deterministic steuard-hard problem. :) You can, in a reasonable amount of time, recognize whether a room is well designed, but you have no known algorithm to generate such a room in a reasonable amount of time.

We deal with similar problems in other domains either through heuristics and (argh - wasted money and time) guess and check, in a practical sense. We also appeal to oracles to solve the problems when we want to just move on and talk about something else. Do you have any oracles near you?

[steuard.livejournal.com]

This is an absolutely glorious description of the problem.

I think I've had an irrational degree of fear about the potential costs of "guess and check". Kim's first sentence replying to you captures some essential points as well. I've considered consulting an oracle, but I don't know anyone handy who does such things for fun and I more or less decided this wasn't important or earth-shaking enough to pay big bucks for. (Some might argue it must then not be important enough to stress over, either. Some might be right.)

[kirin]

Although our walls are something that could certainly be described as a light neutral cream (but I'm sure were described much more excitingly in practice, along with the half-dozen other shades I couldn't really tell apart at all), I did take a perverse sort of pride in the fact that after we picked out our fireplace marble, carpet, hardwood, railing, cabinet, kitchen flooring, and counter-top colors the builders of our house made us sign a little form that says we acknowledge that our color choices might be slightly outside the ordinary and therefor might make the house incrementally more difficult to sell. We must be doing something right.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

I was quite honestly a little proud of you guys (though not surprised) when I first heard about that. And it's still one of those anecdotes that comes to mind whenever I'm forced to think about mass-produced homes and homeowner's associations.

[feuervogel]

They're barely grey ;) (Better than baby's breath (pink) or French ivory (an unpleasant shade of yellow).) Maybe one of these centuries we'll care enough to paint them. Until then, there's too much furniture to move.