I was looking at my fan deck, eyeing the pinks and thinking about how many colors I’ve used over the years. Most of them have been a success, but there were some definite misses. Let me recount a lesson I learned in 2006, pre-blog.
Before we bought our first house, Brandon and I lived in an apartment with a very permissive landlord when it came to paint colors. It was great! We were in our early to mid-twenties with free reign to choose whatever colors we wanted to live with. The living and dining room were purple! The second bedroom was dark blue, and later as my office/studio, pink! Not every room was crazy — I painted the bedroom a creamy white, and left the kitchen and bathroom beige. But then there was the back room. It was kind of a mudroom that had been created when the house, formerly a single-family home, was split up into apartments with separate front and back entrances.
I had the great idea to paint that back room hot pink. It was a pass-through, not an everyday living space. Let’s have fun with it! Be bold! So I painted it, finishing up at night, and it wasn’t until the next day that I realized what an awful mistake it was. On a bright, sunny day, light flooded the room and the entire space glowed pink. It shone its bad-taste aura into the adjacent kitchen, making itself known anytime we so much as went to get a glass of water. I think we lived with the room like that for a week before I had my next brilliant idea: tone the hot pink down with stripes.
