Have you ever bought the wrong home paint color? Or maybe you have a can of black and white paint sitting in your garage?
Well mixing your own custom paint colors may be the answer to what you have envisioned for your color theme, sometimes instead of dumping the "wrong" paint, it can still be saved and used for your home painting project…
Keep on reading to find out further on how to use custom colors, how to lighten, darken, intensify and much more!
Darken the Color
To make a color darker, add some black or gray craft colorant to it. Use black when darkening already deep colors, and gray when working with lighter colors. It takes a relatively small amount of black to visibly darken a pastel. But when going for a dramatic change, be prepared to use a lot of colorant.
A rule of thumb is, stay within 2 shades of the starting color. Trying to turn a pale sky blue color into a dark navy blue will only lead to frustration.
Intensify the Color
If you want your custom paint color to look more vivid, you will need to add more of the base color.For example, to liven up a tan color, add some yellow or orange to it. To brighten up a sage green, add more green.
Lighten Up the Color
The only way to make a paint color lighter is to add white paint to it. The amount will depend on how dark the starting paint color is, and how pale you want to make it. But usually it takes a lot of white paint to noticeably lighten up a paint color.
Sometimes it makes more sense to just add a few cups of starting paint to white paint, than the other way around. Lightening up a color is the cheapest way to "stretch" paint, because white paint is usually very cheap. You may already have some white paint leftovers in your garage.
Tone Down the Color
Adding a complement to a color will decrease the color's intensity (complements are 2 colors lying directly across each other on the paint color wheel).
For instance, violet colorant will neutralize a bright yellow and make it look calmer and more sophisticated.
Before you start mixing custom paint colors, realize that you will usually get only an approximation of the color you have in mind. The final color will mimic your desired color, but may not match it exactly.
The final result will depend on the starting color, your experience with mixing paint colors, and available colorants. Paint base will also determine how much a color can be lightened or darkened.