This lovely colorful journey began with 3 gallons of fabulous fence and porch "oops" paint.
Oh my! I tried them out and they covered raw wood fabulously with one coat!!! What a steal at $5/gallon!! I think this is among the most expensive paint sold at Big Orange Box Store.
I envisioned painting our fence, our new wood playset (thank you freecycle!), the raised garden bed posts, the grape arbor.....
As much as I love bright colors, these cool hues are not compatible with our exterior (or friendly relationships with neighbors.) But apparently
someone did use this color on their ranch.
I need a warm tone. I need boring beige or beige-ish.
A green undertone is fine. After all, we have a Brady Bunch era house. Everything inside and out has an olive green undertone.
I pondered the equation:
2 gal of robin's egg blue + 1 gal of tea green + ? = beige
So I went on a mathematical hunt for answers
I love that qualitative things like colors and music can be reduced to quantitative numeric attributes!!
Get Box Store Help. One completely non-math alternative is to go to the box store and see if they will re-tint the oops paint. I recommend doing it on a slow weekday when folks are more likely to be bored!
I did ask to re-tint it when I bought the paint, but the clerk said the oops paint cans are already filled to the rim and there is no more room to add additional tint. (I guess the stores re-tint the paint that people return so that customers cannot just go and "re-purchase" their same color paint at oops prices. I never would have thought about that.)
If I were to go into the store and purchase one of their 5 gallon buckets, they might be willing to mix my 3 gallons of oops paint (showing their store brand label) with their colorant.
But if you want to experience the thrill of the chase and the lure of a challenge.....
Do it Yourself. I'm sure real designers have all sorts of fantastic software tools for this color formula stuff, but I used my trusty old microsoft paint program. Here are the steps I used:
(1)
Visually identify the colors. Using the custom color editor I moved the cursor around the rainbow of colors until I found colors that, to my eye, appeared similar to the gallons of paint in the garage. I picked out these colors to represent the robin's egg blue and green tea colors of oops paint. I also picked out the beige color I was trying to replicate
Oops paint
Oops paint
Hopeful end result for Oops paint!
(2) Obtain RGB values for the colors. Those colors have numeric attributes of hue, saturation, luminosity. More useful are the numbers that show how much red, green and blue are present on a scale from 0 to 255. The three red, green, and blue numbers in sequence define the RGB value for your color.
R: 151 Hue: 120 R: 202 Hue: 54 R: 194 Hue: 40
G: 255 Sat: 240 G: 245 Sat: 207 G: 194 Sat: 80
B: 255 Lum: 191 B: 122 Lum: 173 B: 133 Lum: 154
(3)
Convert RGB values to Hexadecimal (hex) values. Every combination of RGB colors can also be represented by a hexadecimal value which works on a base 16 system (instead of base 10 like a decimal system.) By entering the RGB values a
calculator will provide the hexadecimal number that also identifies the color. The hex numbers are sometimes represented without the "#."
Hex: #CAF57A Hex: #97FFF Hex: #C2C285
(4)
Find out what color the oops paint make when mixed. If you only have one color of oops paint to start with, then you can skip this step! Using the
color combiner I added 1 part green with 2 parts blue by doing the addition in two steps:
Green #CAF57A + Blue #97FFF = New Color: #A0FAD4
New Color: #A0FAD4 + Blue #97FFF = New Color #9CFDEA
(5) Experiment combining new colors with the oops paint to find the best color to add for your desired result. Okay, this would be so much easier if there was a "color subtraction tool" to go along with the color combiner tool! Then I could have input "#C2C285 (beige) minus #9CFDEA (oops mixture) results in the color I need to add!
Knowing that I needed to go on the opposite side of the color wheel to make beige, I knew that I would likely need something in the orange color family to add to my blue-green mixture. I looked at an
html color chart to find the hex codes for various orange colors. Then I plugged them into the color combination tool with the hex code for my final "oops mixture." These are some of the more successful combinations.
(1) #9CFDEA + #FF6600 = #CEB275
(2) #9CFDEA + #FF7700 = #CEBA75
(3) #9CFDEA + #CC7711 = #B4BA7E
6) Keep an eye out for orange (or red and yellow) oops paint! I'll be visiting the big box stores to score some more oops paint. The funny thing is that I saw a gallon of bright orange awhile back and wondered who in the world would want to buy that. Now I know :-)
