As you can see from the title of this post, I chose one of the painted designs for the walls for the bathroom. The main thing was the wallpaper with the decorative stripes in the corners and the vertical striped pattern. These two options were so obvious to me, not because I liked them equally, but because the background image would have been much simpler. But I really liked the stripe design better.
So in the end I flipped a coin. I literally let a quarter decide the design of the bathroom walls for me. Heads, wallpaper with trim. Tails, stripes. And tails won. So I’m getting ready to do a lot of gluing and painting, and I’m aiming for something that looks like this…
It was very interesting to read the comments on yesterday’s post. What really struck me is how people perceive colors differently depending on the design. There were a few people who said something like, “I like the vertical striped design, but I would like it better if they used the colors of the squares. These seem to be softer colors.” That’s not anyone’s exact quote, but it’s the general thought that several people have expressed.
Interestingly, these two designs have exactly the same colors. I used my photo editing software and copied the colors directly from the square wallpaper and pasted those colors into the stripes. But for some reason, when these very colors were arranged in stripes, some people perceived them as different colors.
Anyway, this is just a side note, but I found it very interesting.
After the Mint made the decision for me that I would paint the motif on the wall, I almost grabbed the wallpaper and headed out the door to Sherwin Williams to purchase all the paint. But then I had a moment of clarity before I even got out the door. One repeat of this wallpaper contains 35 different colors, and I want to use every single one of those colors. But at $11.99 each, these 35 swatches would have cost a little over $450 plus tax. That’s a lot more than I wanted to spend on paint.
I decided the only way this would work was to buy a few colors and mix the rest myself. I have a lot of experience mixing my own paint. If you remember, that’s exactly what I did when I painted this cabinet in my studio.
I did NOT purchase 72 color samples for this cabinet. I bought the main colors and then mixed, tested, remixed and tested again a lot to get the remaining colors.
And now I have to do this again for the walls in the bathroom. So I took a repeat of the wallpaper and started grouping the colors into color families. I ended up with 10 different groupings. And then for each group I chose the individual color that I would actually need to purchase to use as a starting point for mixing the rest.
I know the picture is a little hard to see because I couldn’t see the wallpaper curls at the top and bottom. Here’s a better view of how I grouped the colors.
And then here are the colors I decided to purchase.
This is how I approached the whole process of deciding which colors to buy and which colors to mix myself. I ended up buying ten colors of wallpaper and then a white and a black to mix. This saved me a lot of money by going from 35 patterns to 12. But before I can even start painting my walls, I have to do a lot of measuring, marking, taping and mixing! It will be a fun, colorful weekend. I need to find a really good podcast to listen to. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them! I love true crime podcasts, but none of the gory stuff.
