I came up with a few different ideas for what to do with it, ranging between adding a third vibrant color, using a very light neutral, or something in between. I have this little toy from the Benjamin Moore website that I downloaded to play with prospective paint colors, so I thought this would be a good use for it. One caveat: this is a pretty crude tool, so one thing I've learned in using it is that the actual colors that show up in the edited photos are not a good representation of the true color that you would see on a paint swatch. So you'll just have to trust me that I won't pick some horribly ugly color :)
First I started with a couple of neutrals. One of my ideas was to make it a crisp white to go with the trim that's throughout the rest of the floor.
Pretty good - but maybe too much white? What if it was a really light version of one of my color scheme colors, either the orange or red? This color is a super-light orange and is called Gerbera Daisy.
I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of this. It might be all right as a color, but the off-white doesn't make it quite as crisp and modern as maybe I'd like. So what if it was a nice burnt orange?
This pic above is a good example of my color caveat from above. You can see the little swatch in the lower left corner is closer to the color I'm really interested in, but the way it shows up on the walls with this tool looks a little too neon. Setting that aside and assuming it showed up as the color I really wanted, I still feel like maybe it's a bit much. Combined with the green and the brown, it feels a little claustrophobic.
So then I took a different approach. If you remember from my previous post, I had been toying with the idea of a stencil on the wall... Sounds a little crazy, but I had seen something really awesome using a stencil on my favorite blog, so I thought it was worth considering. The only issue is that doing a stencil would require me to take down the Asian scrolls that I had hanging up on the walls in the hallway in order to open up some visual space. (BTW, I wish I could be more specific than "Asian" - I got them at a Japanese fundraising dinner, but they look more like Chinese art that I'm familiar with. Racial.) But change is good, right? So I played with that a little bit. Here's the walls as a blank slate with all decor removed.
In thinking about the stencil idea, I had the colors of burnt orange and white in mind, but was kind of undecided as to which one should be the background, until I did that little experiment above with the orange on the walls. Even with a stencil to break up the intensity of the orange, I think it still might be too much. So I decided to use white as my test background color for this idea.
Now where to get stencils? Well, based on this blog post from Young House Love, I found this website that sells such things (www.cuttingedgestencils.com) and perused the options. So many! You could get stencils that were allover graphic prints (kind of like wallpaper), stencils that were like branches coming down from the ceiling, giant standalone flowers, all kinds of cool stuff. I found that the ones I gravitated to were stencils that evoked flowers kind of growing up out of the trim on the bottom of the wall.
So using my really *awesome* Paint skills, I mocked up a little picture of what one of these things might look like.
I think there's other exciting possibilities for this too, with variations on the orange color - could be lighter, darker could be an accent color, whatever - and variations in the height of the flowers. Soooooo, based on this little experiment, I think I'm definitely interested in pursuing this stencil idea. Exciting! It'll be kind of an artsy challenge, and will add some interest to an otherwise really boring area of the house. There's still a lot more thinking to be done and decisions to make on this before I can get started, but at least now I've got a general direction to move in.
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