Painting with intense, bright or dark colors is fashionable but can be tricky. They don’t always look like you expect them to, and they can be hard to get coverage with.
Bright and dark colors can be deceptive when you’re just looking at a tiny paint chip. What looks nice on the inch square sample chip can be overpoweringly bright or darken the room down too much when you get it on all the walls of a room. If you’re going to put a bright or dark color on a large area, it pays to buy a small amount and put it on a wall before you spend a large amount of money buying enough for the whole job. Many companies now sell small trial sizes for a very small amount of money; they hold enough to give you a good idea of the final effect. If there are no trial sizes, buy a quart. Put the paint on the wall and live with it a day or two. Does the color feel good to you now? Does it make the room feel smaller? Is it oppressive, or cheering? If it seems too much, think about just painting an accent wall in the bright color rather than the entire room, or making a wainscot effect by painting only the lower section of the wall.
Unless you’re painting over with similar color to what’s already on the wall, you may notice when you’re doing your large sample that it’s hard to get full coverage with the bright color. There are a couple of ways to help deal with this. The first is to put a coat of medium gray primer on the walls before you put your fashion color on. Gray pigment covers other colors well, and it’s an easy color to cover over itself. You can frequently do a job with one coat of gray and one coat of the bright fashion color, where it would take three or four coats if you tried to do the job with just the fashion color. That’s a lot cheaper in both labor and paint!
The other way you can get better coverage with a deep color is to have double the pigment shot into it. Note that this will only work if it’s a very deep color shot into a clear base, sometimes called accent base, neutral base or ultra-deep base; this will NOT work if the base had ANY white pigment in it, like a medium base or light base does. Most independent paint stores will do this for you, but is probably impossible at the big box stores because they have to mix the paint as the computer tells them to.
To make painting with dark/bright colors easier, invest is some good tools. You don’t have to buy top of the line brushes and rollers, but don’t buy the cheapest. A cheap brush gives a streaky job. While this is true in any painting job, it’s especially noticeable when you’re fighting for coverage. Likewise, some cheap roller covers don’t take up paint evenly and can leave heavy and light spots. No matter what tools you use, you will find that the brushing doesn’t cover as well as the rolling does. You may need to do an extra go around on the brushed areas to match the coverage on the rolled areas.
This should be all you need to know to add some intense color to your home!
