Coloured paint finishes
and the affect of the surrounding décor and lighting, on those paint finishes
is an interesting subject and one that many consumers do not understand. It is
an issue that can cause much angst for the customer which in turn filters down
to the joiner and the polisher.
Coloured paint finishes
and the affect of the surrounding décor and lighting, on those paint finishes
is an interesting subject and one that many consumers do not understand. It is
an issue that can cause much angst for the customer which in turn filters down
to the joiner and the polisher.
Many if not most final
users assume that if they designate one standard colour for all their paint
finishes throughout the house then everything will look exactly the same.
Unfortunately, this is often not the case.
Firstly, different
gloss levels from one finish to another will reflect light differently which in
turn will make two surfaces look different from one another. So the painted wall
that is finished with a low sheen acrylic paint will often look different to
the joinery that is painted in a gloss finish, even though they are marketed as
being the same colour. Gloss finishes tend to look lighter than satin and matt
finishes. When light hits a gloss finish it tends to bounce off in a straight
line and will enter your eye as a clean representation of what you are looking
at, whereas light reflecting of a matt finish will tend to bounce off in many
different direction and when it enters your eyes it will tend to look slightly
darker.
When those two finishes
are placed side by side and observed at close quarters they will often look
identical but when they are placed within the home or shop and are separated
they can often look quite different.
Then there is the
problem of the actual light source. Natural light will make a paint finish look
a certain colour but that same finish observed with the influence of fluorescent
lighting or LED lighting can look very different. Even natural light entering a
room through a tinted glass will give a different look to that same light
entering through a clear window.
We had a very interesting situation many years ago where
the morning sun shining through a row of Cypress hedge trees made the painted
kitchen take on a greenish tone, As the sun rose in the sky that greenish tone
slowly disappeared. The problem from the owner’s perspective was that she
wasn’t home during the day and so she saw this greenish tone every morning and
hated it but didn’t then get to enjoy the correct colour during the day because
she was away from home. Eventually she paid to have the entire kitchen
repainted in a specific colour that helped neutralise the effect of the green
light in the morning.
So once we accept that different
gloss levels can make one colour look slightly different to another and then we
accept that the light source can alter the look of a paint colour we then have
the issue of the effect of the surrounding décor has on a paint finish.
Every colour within the
home or shop will reflect light off with slight impact on the surrounding
environment. So a bold red carpet may fill the room with a slight reddish hue
that will make every other surface look red, and a grey carpet in that exact
same environment will create a slight grey hue on all the other finishes.
These three
influences will affect the way the painted finishes appear to the naked eye.
This can sometimes be of a concern to your customer who may have chosen
individual colours of preference and never considered the affect each one has on
the other when they are all combined nor have they considered the effect of the
ambient light source. Even placing a dark colour adjacent to a light colour
will create an allusion of the lighter colour looking darker than expected
