Inspirational Sty

My riotously funny Mama once told me a story about a large, nasty sty she had on her eye when she was young. “It was so large I couldn’t see”, she explained. Her expression turned thoughtful, then almost serene as she said “…but I do remember that it was the most beauuuutiful shade of mauve….sigh”. It takes a pretty special attitude to look past a temporary physical deformity and see the beauty in the situation, but my mama certainly did. In fact, growing up exposed to that outlook is the reason for my love of color and design in general: I see inspiration and palette opportunities everywhere now.

Many of my clients struggle with inspiration for color when preparing for interior painting in their homes. They’ll stand for hours in front of the intimidating wall of color strips at the paint store and instantly feel overwhelmed by the choices. No worries, though: paint color inspiration doesn’t have to come from the massive wall of rainbow vomit. Instead, I encourage you to look around, specifically to nature, for clues to your next awesome color scheme. My husband is a perfect example: he frequently uses images of colorful tree frogs to select the palette for his websites. “If it goes together in nature, I trust that it’ll probably look good on screen as well”, he says.

The boy is right (despite a mild case of blue/green colorblindness, but that’s a story for a different blog…) about nature and her palettes. One of the prettiest palettes I’ve ever seen was courtesy of a spectacular bruise I received during a 30 mile bike ride recently. I fell off the bike and landed mostly on my hip, causing two giant contusions. The coloration (maybe you should just stop reading here if you’re squeamish and go get yourself some weakness tissues) changed daily, starting at a subdued grey and morphing into a bright purple. Being the opportunistic color hound that my mama raised me to be, what did I do? I whipped out my iphone and used my Sherwin Williams ColorSnap App. Using close-up pics of the bruise, I created palettes that were soothing and, well, inspirational. I’m looking forward to recommending that palette to a client one day. When the client asks where I found the inspiration for those colors, I’ll serenely say “once I fell off my bike and had a massive contusion so painful I couldn’t walk for a day, but it was the most beautiful shade of plum….sigh”.