color me shady part 2: where's waldo

When I was a kid, my mom and I enjoyed looking through the Where's Waldo books. When Hawk and I began paint-sampling, we felt like we were right back in that sea of color with hours to wait before finding our man.  Here is just a sampling of the swatches we picked out.  I would say this is 1/10th of what we ended up with.

A lot of people suggested that we first buy swatches of paint and then get some paint on the walls. But we found that without pictures, neither could get inside the other's head and see the finished product to appreciate the swatch suggestions we proposed to each other. It makes sense. You begin with a picture because you're standing in the room you want to paint. 

Here (finally) is the look of the dining room when we moved in. The faded green look on top of a peachy-beige just didn't work for us.

 The view above faces west. Behind us is the living room, and the doorway to the left leads into the kitchen.

This next photo faces southeast into the living room. But look at that great china cabinet!!!

Since we begin with what is truly visible, why not continue on the path and provide each other with more of what we can actually see?

painting lesson #2: Finding inspiration and grabbing real-life pictures helps you figure out what you want to see in the end result.  My two favorite magazines, which are now also defunct due to the recession, are CottageLiving and Domino.  Hawk also likes House Beautiful and Architectural Digest.  We used their photos and many we found online to give each other a usable image of our ideas. Our brains work differently; Jen can mentally turn an object around, Hawk is more visual and benefits from seeing directly.

{devoted detail}: Dealing with paint became a matter of communication. Not jumping to conclusions with "so what you're saying is," and rather, properly and adequately conveying what we wanted to each other. It is already too easy to presume to understand the other and to become irritated when the point isn't equally understood. Being clear by providing the sort of "evidence" the other cognitively needed helped us avoid a multitude of heated disagreements.

coming up: color me shady part 3: come into the light


~j

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