Start randomly choosing colors that attract you and after you’ve made 50 to 100 selections, there will be a pattern to your color choices. Guaranteed. I see it with every client.

Following the inspiring color choice can entice us to try a new flavor. The Nespresso company has made an artform out of color choice as it affects product packaging and display placement. (And I love the coffee!)

You can’t escape your own context whether you know it or not.  No matter how “objective” we try to be, or think we are, our perceptions of color are contingent upon who we are. We can’t escape it.

And no matter how forward-thinking or retro-minded we may be, we are still in the present moment. Which is why we need to repaint, remodel, re-brand, etc. Time is marching on and change is inevitable. Colors go in and out of fashion because pushing the changes of fashion is the flow of time and perception.

That said, can a color choice be out of context for a particular project or a particular room? Absolutely, if that project or room already has a defined color scheme. Choosing colors that integrate into an existing color plan has a different set of parameters than creating a completely new color plan.

If you want to know what you really think and feel about color, pay attention to what inspires you and look for patterns as your choices add up. Inspired, sensational color can be yours!

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Some paint brands like Benjamin Moore have thousands of colors to choose from.

The Benjamin Moore line alone has over 3,600 colors in their paint line. Paint companies have developed marketing tools to help you choose color,  but you’ll quickly discover that placing those colors in your home can result in a new level of confusion. Calling a expert color consultant will help you cut through the confusion and get to your best color plan.

Most people have a lot of questions around hiring a color expert. If you don’t have a personal referral, you might wonder if the person you’re calling is qualified. Hiring a color consultant to choose paint colors for your home can feel like a toss of the dice. You might wonder: Will their sense of taste and style be one I share? Will they boss me around? What if I hate their ideas? Etc.

I’ve heard all of those concerns (and more) from my clients. Here’s my advice:

1. Do your due diligence and find out about the color consultant’s education and experience.
2. Call them up and ask them about their process.
3. Ask to see photos of their projects so you can get an idea of their level of expertise.
4. Ask for testimonials or references.
5. Ask them about their pricing and how they estimate the time and cost of the consult.

Remember, anybody can call themselves a color consultant. Just because somebody “loves” color or happens to be standing in a paint store, don’t presume expertise.

Read more about what to expect from a color consult with me.

Are Blue and Green BFFs?

The other day I was listening to the streaming radio station Kink FM out of Portland, Oregon  and heard an ad for Northwest Natural Gas. It’s official. NW Natural Gas company has co-opted the color blue, even renaming natural gas “Blue”.  And the characteristics they’ve assigned “Blue” are many. According to the NW Natural website “Blue. . .Hates Wasting Energy . . . .. Blue is Reliable . .  Blue Despises High Bills. .  (and).  . Blue and Green are friends.”

Is blue now a responsible, conservative color that also happens to be the environmental movement’s new BFF? The gas company would like us to think so. Especially now that  the marketing kudos for environmental sensitivity are a big positive in the world of commerce.

It’s nothing new for a company to use color to relate both subliminal and overt product and marketing ideas to their potential and repeat customers. It’s a smart thing to do. Ask someone in a roomful of people to describe the color Coca-cola red and you’ll soon find somebody who can. Color and marketing are natural partners.

But a color has more than one personality, despite any one expert or company’s declarations. And when a company uses mainly color to define itself and it’s product, they are also declaring themselves the most pertinent and contemporary interpreters of that color.

Taking that position with a product or a color invites comparisons. If a product is clearly a greater good, comparisons are welcome. But natural gas isn’t one of those products. Like all petrochemical energy sources, there are defined environmental disadvantages to natural gas. Those product disadvantages don’t go away with a re-branding, regardless of the color assigned to it or any of the attributes that color may possess.

Calling natural gas the new “blue” doesn’t turn it green (or make it green’s new BFF) 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.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Walking through the streets of Bordeaux, France I saw these beautiful faded purple doors. Against the grays and browns of the buildings and the weather that day, the violet color brought a subtle and rich dimension to the street view. Photo: Cristina Acosta

Inspired by the colors in the landscape of urban city streets I've been exploring the colors by painting textiles. The sheer matte quality of the silk is the perfect substrate to convey the feeling of the colors from the street in Bordeaux, France. My intent was not to replicate the colors visually as much as to convey the sensations I received while walking through the colors in that landscape. Photo credit: Cristina Acosta

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. The geography of a place along with the cycle of seasons as well as the weather and light  combine with the presence or absence of human culture to create the colors of a place.

In my  paintings and drawings other concerns (like image or texture) overtake this concept, so I decided to work with these color ideas in textiles.

Painting silk scarves for myself or friends is a relaxing way for me to play with color stories.  (And I have something fun to wear when I’m done!) This week I painted this silk scarf directly from the inspiration of some recent travels. I’ve been fortunate to be able to travel with my teenage daughter, Isabella Barna during her fencing competition season. She competed in a few fencing World Cups, so we both enjoyed traveling to both small and large towns in Europe for the events.

The many changes in landscape I’ve experienced this year contrast in my mind, mixing with the sensations of place. Each memory has a different palette of colors and values. Playing with these memories and translating them to visual ideas allows me to re-live the sensations of the memories as I create visual structure around them. It’s sort of like selecting photos for a scrapbook page, I select among the thoughts and feelings of memory for the creative expression.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

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.

The color yellow is common in many natural landscapes throughout the year. I took this photo of bamboo stalks in Bordeaux, France while walking through the public garden in the downtown.

Yellow labels can “disappear” against a bright yellow background. Decreased contrast sensitivity can cause blue and black  or blue and green to appear the same. White or light colored type on a black or dark colored background may be almost impossible to read for that customer.

Colors not only affect people differently because of personal and cultural conditioning and experiences. The visual  abilities of each person affects how and if they perceive a color. Keeping in mind the possibility for differences in color perceptions is especially important for color consultants. Yellow is not always a sunny color.

Read more about the aging eye at LighthouseInternational.org

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Purple has two "near-complements" which are orange and green. This bathroom photo shows how well purple bridges both the sage green tile color and the "orange" colored natural wood.

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.

The beautiful combination of egg carton colors In a supermercado in Cuernavaca, Mexico caught the lens of my camera. Notice how the green is "softer" than the stronger color of violet. Putting a bright color next to a softer color creates interest at the same time it quiets the brighter color (a little). Note how in the photo of the bathroom shower above, the purple is much brighter than the green. It's the same principle.

Purple and green pair beautifully in the garden.

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. Here’s why. Purple is a mixture of red and blue. That means you can easily coordinate purple with those colors. Green is another color that coordinates beautifully with purple, but not for the same reason. The color green is what artist’s refer to as a “near complement” to purple.

Even though a “near complement” sounds like something socially awkward, in artist’s terms it describes a particular secondary color’s relationship to another color on the color wheel. (If you want to learn more about color relationships including what is a primary, secondary and tertiary color, read my book, Paint Happy.)

Deep grayish purple and medium grass green are natural foils to the outdoor patio furniture in this retail location. Patio World, Bend, Oregon.

If all of this sounds too complicated, stop before you decide that choosing colors is just too complex of a subject. You don’t have to learn any complicated aesthetic terms to enjoy color. Look around you and you’ll see unlikely combinations that are beautiful together. In nature you’ll often see green and purple together at your local farmer’s market or produce section at the supermarket. Eggplants, artichokes and asparagus are examples of vegetables where the colors green and purple exist beautifully together.

Consciously seeing color and noting color combinations you like is inspiration you can bring into your life and into your home. Next time you’re thinking about home colors, look beyond the paint store before you start choosing color chips. You might surprise yourself with the combinations you realize you enjoy.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

The colors of white and silver (metallic light gray) are reliably at the top of auto sales lists annually. Faithful and reliable are attributes that keep people coming back year after year.

Sam the Snowman had it right when he sang, “Everyone wishes for silver and gold.” Sam, just in case you don’t know, was the narrator of  the 1964 classic Christmas TV special, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. But Sam the Snowman was only partly right. Though to be fair, Sam didn’t drive or carry a wallet.

According to Ford Motor Co., and PPG Industries (Pittsburgh Paint), car buyers in the U.S. still vote with their wallets for the color silver as the most popular car color in the U.S. for the 9th year in a row. Colors trailing behind silver are white, then black. The rest of the automobile color line-up varies by city and region.

Sometimes color preferences by region are obvious, like the practicality of owning white cars in hot dessert areas of the country. Sometimes color choices are not so easy to ascribe a meaning. Dee-Ann Durbin, an AP writer recently wrote about the Ford and PPG studies if you want the details.

Despite the apparent popularity of these current colors, you can’t help but wonder if they are as popular as they may seem. If every car buyer could easily custom order a paint color, the statistics might shift dramatically. I own a white vehicle, but only because it was (to me) the least obnoxious color on the lot when I bought my mini-van.

I also considered a white car because I avoid washing my car and white doesn’t seem to show  dirt as much as the other available car colors. My point in telling you this isn’t to share my preferences (or car-washing habits) as it is to give you some insight into the possible reasons behind a particular color choice.

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?

So how does any of this color talk help you when you’re choosing colors for your home? My advice is to consider color trends with reservations rather than to accept that whatever color is trendy is right for you.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

White comes in many colors from warm beige whites to cool blue whites.

Crisp and fresh or harsh and sterile, a laundry line of contradictory meanings flap around the color white. How we understand color is based on who and where we are. And the meaning color has for us can change along with changes in our lives and our location. White on a tropical island is a very different experience from  white (as snow) covering a northern winter landscape.

I was looking at the color white  last week and realized that for me, white had became a symbol of global interconnection. How did a color I see every day suddenly have a new meaning? Here’s what happened.

Last week an early season snow of over 5 inches fell around my home in Oregon. As the snow piled up (and the shock wore off!) I noticed a strange thing about the color of the snow. It was tinged a warm white. At first the warm white color of the snow wasn’t noticeable, but as the layer of stained snow thickened, it was obvious that something unusual had happened.

Poking my fingers into the top layer of snow, I could remove that soil tinged beige layer of snow to reveal the cold blue-white layer of snow beneath that had fallen earlier as part of the same storm. It was a beautiful contrast of whites.

The next day the news reported that a dust storm in the neighboring state of Washington near Moses Lake over 300 miles away from my  home in Bend, Oregon had tinged the snowfall with the warm red topsoil from Eastern Washington farm lands.

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”.

The idea of white as a unifying color isn’t new. The color white is regularly used in home decor as an interior or exterior paint trim color that repeats often enough around a home that it unifies a variety of other colors. White is so popular in architecture that some paint companies such as Benjamin Moore, Pittsburgh Paints and Sherwin Williams have over one hundred whites in their paint lines to choose from.

White is everywhere from underwear to outerwear. It’s in most everybody’s closet and has been for decades. White dress shirts have been a mainstay of men’s business fashion for over a century. From baby diapers to bed sheets, the color white in some variation is one color I would bet most people on the planet have. Billions of people and the color white. The meanings will keep on.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Unexpected combinations of color create beautiful views, like this set of doorways I quickly shot outside a restaurant in Oaxaca, Mexico

You may not know this, but you were covered in color symbolism, meanings and 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.

That can be a lot of baggage for a color to carry. No wonder there are so many experts trying to decipher the language of color and meaning. The first big breakthrough in the color world was in 1670 when Issac Newton invented the colour wheel. The color wheel is based on his studies of optics and his observation that a prism breaks white light into the variety of colors we see in the visible spectrum.

The study of light and color captured scientists and artists for centuries, culminating in the perfect marriage of science and technology in the late 1800′s when the paint tube was invented.

With the invention of the paint tube, artists could venture into nature and paint the effects of light and color with an immediacy that shocked the art world. Artists now called Impressionists became masters of the retinal sensations of color. Monet, Seurat, Pissaro, and others led a visual revolution of color that seeped from the halls of science to stain artist’s canvases across Europe and then the world.

Within only a few years the Impressionists splintered into a variety of off-shoots including Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, Expressionists, and more. During the ensuing 120+ years the science and art of color and light has become tremendously refined.

With the rise of large corporations and the profession of marketing, there are new players creating color meaning. These companies hire color experts to suggest color schemes that will sell their goods and services to their target demographic of customers. Psychologists, scientists and technicians create tests and scenarios to determine and then predict the effects of color on a variety of human actions from how much and/or how fast a person eats to whether they linger over one color of computer screen longer than another.

Still, the Rosetta Stone of the language of color has eluded everyone. It seems that color meaning, with it’s attendant symbolism and psychology is a moving target. I love that alongside the inroads of science, the mystical and intuitive are integral to beautiful color use.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Note: Hire me to create your commercial, residential and institutional color projects.

Playful young boy selling colorful wood and corn beads in Oaxaca, Mexico

It’s easy to stereotype a culture with a particular color palette, and Hispanic cultures, like Mexico are often seen by Northern neighbors through a lens  saturated with color. The tint of that lens, saturated with stereotypes can limit the perceptions within one’s gaze. It’s not always a bad thing. A stereotype exists because it identifies a characteristic, sometimes with a negative view and sometimes with a positive view. The problem with stereotypes happens when the stereotype overrides reality.

Mexico, Oaxaca city street scene is an example of natural stone colors mixed with painted vibrant colors. Note how this photo has colors similar to the beads the young boy is holding over his face.

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.

During the late 1990′s and early 2000′s when I was actively promoting my licensed line of signature home decor design, I was often  perplexed and baffled when potential clients would turn down my line with comments  that the colors were too bright. Especially when these same manufacturing companies were already heavily promoting the work of Anglo artists renowned for bright colors such as Laurel Birch, Susan Sargent and Mary Engelbreit.

Sweets offered by a Oaxacan street vendor display a variety of rich natural colors.

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. Though I knocked on that licensing door and for a brief time thought I’d been invited in, I never was successful in my  licensing efforts at the time.

Though there is always someone who may claim sour grapes, I heard too many negative comments from manufacturers during that time that my colors and the style of my color use was  too particular to or representative of my Latino culture. The implied meaning was that the work would not sell. This happened despite an almost decade long successful national run of my imagery and design with my ceramc tile business.  A run that included years of free editorial coverage by mainstream mid-tier home decor magazines such as Better Homes & Garden’s Special Interest Publications and other periodicals.

The stone facade of this church in Oaxaca, Mexico, displays the variety of earthy tones similar to the street vendors tray of sweets.

With the perception of hindsight, I realize that what I was up against was a stereotype and a perception that I couldn’t vanquish. Though it seems so obvious to me now, at the time I never expected that  colors I painted with along with the link to my Spanish name would be inexorably linked with my Hispanic heritage in such a limiting fashion. Until then, I really thought that my talent and hard work spoke for itself.

When it finally hit me that my Latino heritage was the “elephant in the room” during my licensing negotiations, I redid my website and my marketing efforts, bringing the discussion of my Hispanic heritage front and center. I was frustrated that my art and the color stories I presented were only seen through the context created by stereotypes my potential clients could not seem to overcome.

During the ensuing years I’ve thought a lot about my experience with stereotypes and still haven’t found a simple or elegantly concise answer. What I know to be true is that the context my art and design were seen in by the manufacturers considering my line not only trumped content, it was a lens that obscured any content that didn’t echo their context. Why that context exists is a product of at least 150 years (the end of the Mexican War) of intercultural perceptions that have defined the U.S. and the complex relationship in U.S. society with Hispanic minority cultures. It’s a mindset that was too much for me to overcome.

For decades, American advertising that referred to Hispanics  in the U.S. has focused on the aspects of bright color within the Latino or Hispanic cultures without a nod to the rest of the colors present in the cultural environment. And like all humans, what we believe or have been prepared to believe is usually what we perceive to be true despite contradictory evidence.

I’ve included photos from a trip I took to Oaxaca to illustrate how opposite color palettes that are both bright or subtle can be culturally accurate. I chose photos from Mexico to illustrate the visual color concepts that are often associated with Mexican-Americans as well as other Hispanic cultures from other regions by the majority culture in the U.S.

You’ll see when you look at these photos that color schemes exist that are not always what we expect and where we expect to see them. Though I am asking you to look at the colors within a photograph, I am also asking you to look beyond  preconceptions you may have about Hispanic color palettes. Looking consciously is the first step to seeing clearly.

When we don’t acknowledge those things that exist just because we don’t want them to be there, we limit ourselves as a society. This is true whether you talking about politics, business or color. Everything is woven into our patterns of perception. Stereotypes are only a shorthand to perception, they don’t engender the clarity necessary for an inclusive society. And part of an inclusive society is visual representation at all levels.

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month is an opportunity to celebrate the beauties and gifts that are part of our country’s  heritage  as well as to acknowledge the mosaic of cultures that make up all of the U.S. During these trying times of environmental, political and economic upheaval it is more important than ever that we work together as a nation to create the best future possible for our progeny.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Note: Cristina Acosta is a color consultant working for a variety of clients – residential, commercial and institutional. Hire her for your color expert.