Makeover Distress
After eight hours of labor on the part of two very good painters, my studio has been transformed. The walls are now a lovely shade of aqua. The color virtually sings around the walls of the room, significantly brightening a large space that has always suffered a dearth of natural light. It's downright happy now.
It is also absolutely the wrong shade of aqua for me.
In my mind: the shallows of the Caribbean Sea, slightly muted. On the wall: Miami Vice, missing only some pink up-lights. Damn.
The color also happens to be an exact match for my home environment during an especially stressful, heartbreaking time of my life. Pretty as it is, being enveloped in this shade of aqua gives me intense anxiety attacks.
It's hard not to feel crazy when that happens - I mean, it's just a color. But, as my friend Lynne reminds me, color will never be just color to me. If you are a fellow artist-type who, given the chance, would eat color for breakfast, you know what I mean. Color is rich with emotional meaning and vibrational essence. It's personal, it's social, and it's spiritual. I know that color can transform your psyche, if you let it. All the same, the wrong color can cause sensitive folks like me to vibrate like a tuning fork. In a bad way.
You see why I must do something about this. Toward that end, today's task is to get some paint and start experimenting with more sample boards.
I know what you're thinking: didn't you already do this? How come you didn't know that this color would be wrong? You were painting big rectangles on the wall and moving painted foam core around the room...what happened?
Well, what happened is that I got all smart-like. I thought, what if I chose a happy medium? Something with the lower saturation of "safe and pretty" but with a little more bent toward turquoise like "bold and daring" had. And to figure out what a good compromise might be, did I get another quart of paint and test it? Oh, no. I selected an in-between color from a paint chip. Obviously, I thought could tell from a 1x3-inch swatch what would look good in a 30 x 15 foot room! Sharp as a marble, I tell ya.
So, here we are. My first idea is to use the current color as a base coat, then glaze over this with a deeper Bahaman sea blue. I would take a lot of the glaze away, hopefully revealing a good amount of the base. The goal would be to simulate my sought-after Caribbean waters. It could bring more depth to the walls, but it might also darken the walls too much, causing me to lose my newfound light. Not to mention the fact that that my walls are heavily textured and the glaze will exaggerate it.
I could leave the blue in place and add a parchment effect on one wall, as well as the door to the Underworld (also known as my walk-in crawl space). This might cut the aqua intensity just enough while adding some interest. It's possible the room would be perfectly fine with some warm golden tones to balance the blue.
Another idea is to selectively repaint walls in different colors...perhaps bring in some lavender and a soft green. The room might end up looking fabulous and perky, or it might look like endless Easter. Thus, this idea is lower down on the list.
Finally, I could just choose a new color and paint it all over again. However, I have no guarantee that I won't make a mistake with the color a second time around, either. Make that, third time around - after all, this was the one room that never looked right in the colors we chose upon move-in. It's tricky!
At this point, I have no idea what I will do. And, honestly, I hear myself rant about this and think, "Alix, there are far, far worse problems to have in life than walls that are painted the wrong color." I know that; truly, I do. And yet, until this is sorted out, I just can't settle down.
So, in between trying to save the world of this or that, I'm going to try to save myself with another trip to the paint store.
Wish me luck.
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