Choosing Colours - the book

Hints on colour and paint

We all expect a great deal from our decoration these days, as though it really is going to make us better people. And fashion has changed too; as we travel more, we want to bring back the food, the wines and the colours we see on our holidays. Our demands are easily met: we can find paint ranges on every high street offering Turkish Blues and Moroccan Reds. So it is hardly surprising that we think it possible to paint our houses, both inside and out, with readily available product, and expect it to somehow transport our homes to somewhere just north of the Equator. The light in Lesbos or Sicily is pretty bright, of course. So the eye that accommodates the startling contrast of brilliant white houses and deep inky shadows has no problem accommodating the balance of white and strong blue, of powerful colours next to each other. On the other hand, in grey old blighty, such colour combinations look very sad. The white looks grey and the blue, well, it would look good by itself, but it appears sullied by the white. It seems that the first trick to getting such colours to work, is to avoid this contrast problem, so just forget the combinations. White alone can be marvellous on cottages and houses set into a green landscape, and even ultramarine blue has its place by itself as a garden wall colour.
The second trick is to understand what colours work with the colour of light that we have in Britain. We know instinctively that our climate's light is different, it seems softer, somehow greyer, and actually subtler than the brilliant glare of a Mediterranean noon. But this description of our light is not only subjective, it sums up the optical character of it as well. Northern light is different in its very substance to Mediterranean light, which may sound strange given that it all arrives at the planet Earth from the same source. But this makes sense once you remember that light is composed of many different colours (that can be released from white light with a prism) that together are fused into what we generically call 'white' light or 'daylight'. In fact daylight can vary enormously in colour, (according to the time of day and the amount of dust and moisture in the atmosphere), from the hot orange of a sunset to the pure, full-spectrum light of a midday blazing sun that is just about the perfect, balanced blend of all the different frequencies, producing the truest 'white' light.

But think, that in that moment at midday, a person standing in the shadow of a tree might be lit only from the blue sky above, in an almost purely blue light.. (photographers know all about this, of course, and exploit it when photographing clothes catalogues; another good winter read, by the way.)

Pure white light, Lesbos light, is a middle benchmark on what is called the Kelvin scale, ranging from 1o to 9,000o. It hovers roughly around the middle, at 5,500o. Below it swarm the hordes of artificial light bulb types that give a much warmer light. Above white light on the scale lies a vast realm of blue light; 8,500o for light that illuminates you in shadow on a sunny day, and 7,000o for the light that you get on an ordinary cloudy day in our country.

That last figure is sobering. It means for most of the year we are a blue people. That is, until the sun shines. So it stands to reason that the colours that work in our climate, in our gardens, on our buildings and exterior paintwork, in our rooms ( and especially those north facing rooms!) are those colours that will hum, and even sing, a blue song. Equally, those colours that don't, lime green and mid-scarlet red for example, can look bleak and tatty.

Pure cobalt, or ultramarine, that has a purplish hue, will work undiluted. Prussian or Phthalo blues that veer to the green look better when mixed with some white, producing exquisite, cool pale blues. Purples with plenty of blue in them also look good, and the same goes for greens. Oranges and warm yellows are worth gambling with, simply because they don't look cold and optically are paler, 'brighter' than other hues. They make the grade literally by bludgeoning their way in. By contrast, complex muddy colours, which are very fashionable in genteel homes, are also excellent in our climate because the blue light brings out the grey, tricking the eye, and producing a pleasant confusion.

And muddiness, or complexity, is the saving grace of a family of pigments that we know collectively as 'earth' colours; yellow ochre, raw sienna, red ochre etc. These pigments save the day by widening enormously the range of decorating colours we can use. This is partly because they derive from clays and so, hence, directly from our environment. This comfortable subconscious association is coupled with an intriguing depth and complexity of associations, because it is the earth colours that tint our limestone and sandstone, marble and terracotta. They are colours with an 8,000 year-old decorating pedigree and are the only truly universal pigments. Yellow ochre is the only yellow I know that when mixed with white will produce a cream colour guaranteed not to turn green in a north-facing room.

But I'm undermining my own argument here. The earth colours work as well here as in Greece or Morocco, albeit in perhaps less violent combinations. So it is possible to catch perhaps just a resonance of that holiday, with a dab of burnt sienna and yellow ochre. Who knows, with global warming, I may rewrite this article in five years exhorting the nation to paint entire housing estates in Caribbean colours...

© Kevin McCloud 2003

Kev's hot tip:
When deciding on a colour, buy a sample test pot of paint and instead of using it to paint out a daub on your walls, use it to paint the interior of a cardboard box. That way you'll be able to see how the colour reflects light onto itself and intensifies in appearance accordingly. You can even cut holes in the box to represent windows and paint a 'ceiling' in the box white and so on. But I'd draw the line at buying doll's house furniture to go in it.

The Choosing Colours book is readily available at W H Smiths and other leading booksellers and you can buy it on-line from us, click here, or alternatively from Amazon. To choose and buy paint - click buy paint.

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