Color Conversations with Cristina

Color does more than convey a mood or set off a room. Color is a language that continually evolves with the cultures that contribute the shades and tones of meaning each of us sees. Artist and Color Consultant, Cristina Acosta, shares her insights and expertise about the colors in your life – your home – your business.

Hiring a Paint Color Consultant

Most people have a lot of questions around hiring a color expert. Just because somebody “loves” color or happens to be standing in a paint store, don’t presume expertise. Remember, anybody can call themselves a color consultant. Do your due diligence and find out about the color consultant’s education and experience.

Is Blue the New Green, or are they Just Best Friends?

Calling natural gas the new “blue” doesn’t turn it green no matter how many times anybody says it. And when the gas company insists that it does, their efforts to tint the green movement into a shade that they wash their product with takes green-washing to a new low.

Creating with Colors from the Landscape

I’ve been thinking a lot about color and culture, and have been exploring that theme in my fine art for many years. The landscape around us effects how we perceive color. This week I painted this silk scarf directly from the inspiration of some recent travels.

When the Color Yellow isn’t Sunny

One of the unexpected changes that can happen to the aging eye includes the color yellow. For some people the lens of the eye becomes increasingly dense and more yellow with age. With that change, contrast sensitivity declines and dark colors can be difficult to distinguish from each other.
The yellowing effect may not be affecting you personally, but if you are a retailer or manufacturer selling products, how your products are being perceived by the older customer with this condition affects your sales.

Nature’s Lovers are Colors – Purple and Green Together

Landscape artists often refer to the color combination of violet/purple and green as “Nature’s Lovers”. Not only do purple and green look good together on an artist’s canvas, they can look amazing together in your home. From soft gray violet to deep amethyst purples, painting your walls your favorite shade of purple will go with more colors than you might think.

Everyone Wishes for Silver and Gold. Is it a Color Trend or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

Because silver and white are such popular car colors, car manufacturers will tend to play it safe and make more silver and white colored cars. Is the most popular car color the sign of a trend or a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Blanca, a New Meaning for the Color White

Mother Nature was giving us a lesson in whites along with a reminder that the borders we humans put around our cities, states, territories and countries are invisible to her. During those moments I spent looking at the subtly colored layers of white snow, white became my new “green”.

Color Meanings, Color Symbolism and Color Psychology

You were covered in color psychology from the day you saw your first pink or blue baby blanket. Scientists, religions, governments, mystics and artists have always assigned meaning to colors over the centuries of human kind and there’s no way to get away from those meanings. Regardless of the culture you’re from you’ve been steeped in color symbolism.

How those color meanings translate for you depends upon when and where you were born as well as your gender, socio-economic status, the perception of your race and culture within the larger population, as well as your personal thoughts, beliefs and experiences.

Hispanic Heritage Month Sept. 15th thru Oct 15th – The Colors of Culture

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month is an opportunity to celebrate the beauties and gifts the heritage of Hispanic culture as well as to acknowledge the mosaic of cultures that make up all of the U.S. The irony for me being an acculturated Latina born in Los Angeles is that I know that though Anglos from many cultures have representative crafts saturated with color, like Polish paper-cuts or Scandinavian tole painting, American Anglos will often focus on the colorful aspects of Mexican American visual culture while ignoring most of the subtle colors that are part of the same mix. To this day, there are no Latina visual artists licensing their decor lines at the supported level of acceptance any of the above Anglo artists have achieved.

Best Ever You Paint and Color Expert

Best Ever You magazine has invited Cristina Acosta to be their Paint and Color Expert. The editor, Elizabeth Hamilton-Guarino along with her team has put together an anomaly in the current publishing business climate; a successful and growing magazine. Kudos to the staff at Best Ever You!

Forecasting Color Trends – How Colors Come and Go

Have you ever wondered why when fashions change with the season you see a lot of the same colors at a clothing store or home decor store and those same colors seem to be everywhere? If you think it’s because those colors are suddenly “in-style” by some magical arrangement of molecules, think again. The group think behind the styles in colors comes from, you guessed it — a group!

Can Color Change Your Mood

The senses we rely on to understand the world around us aren’t always accurate. Shapes and colors manipulate how you perceive the world around you, along with texture, temperature, scent, sound and more.

Updating A Bathroom – Figure Out Your Design Concept

Remodeling advice can be confusing. Cristina Acosta gives you a tool to cut through advice overload to get what you want.

Positioning Makes Perfect

Color use is not a slam dunk. I see this with manufacturers who put a “Latin Color Palette” on a set of sheets or towels, slap a Spanish name on it and expect that they’ve done their part reaching the Latino market. This is especially annoying when the front person isn’t obviously Latino. A few years ago Sears and Ty Pennington did this with a design in his licensed signature line of bedding.

Getting Into Your Client’s Head – An article for Design Industry Professionals

Though we may have a good idea of what we like, getting into the heads of our clients and guiding them to know what they like is a bigger challenge. We are not privy to the experiences they have, and even if we were, the tendency within ourselves to relate to the client through our own story influences our perceptions. The way any of us respond to a color is the result of our experience, good or bad. Everything we see, hear, feel, smell and touch informs our color perceptions.

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