Modernizing with color, Part 3

Wagner's designers knocked it out of the park with their traditional fireplace mantle color make-over.  Seriously - they absolutely nailed it.  They re-set the tract home creativity bar. 

Here's a screengrab from this YouTube video promoting their Flexio paint sprayer. 

Look at that color shown in the pic above!!!  Compared to that, my fireplace below looks downright drab: 

 I did a make-over in an unremarkable battleship gray.  It's better than the builder-grade white that was there originally, but it lacks the wow-factor of Wagner's paint, which is subtle but with vibrant teal undertones. 

Action shot of spraying in process.  The TV commercial was supposed to be about the sprayer itself, but when we saw it, we became transfixed by the color to the point of not even remembering what corresponding product was being advertised.

As soon as my husband saw this, he said, "We need that color for our house".   I still have additional trim work and three sets (count 'em) of double converging pocket doors that need updating from builder-white to an appropriate non-traditional paint color, so the color choice question is huge for us regardless of what we do with our fireplace. 

I know there will be people all over American asking the question, "What color did Wagner use in their sprayer commercial?" But if my results are any indication, they won't be finding an easy answer, because Wagner appears not to have published the formula. 

However, where there's a will, there's a way.  What we did is capture a number of image stills from that commercial, and then I asked my husband to use Photoshop to extract some representative formulas from those stills, bracketing the shade range, which obviously shows some variability due to lighting and angle differences.  Even if Wagner had published what they used for their paint, their formula wouldn't necessarily look optimal in my house or your house or any other house.  The trick is finding the right color formula for the specific space and lighting conditions, and that's usually a trial and error process involving a number of approximated colors. 

Anyway, here are the stills:

Taken with my DSLR pointed at my paused TV set.  This appears more vibrantly teal than the YouTube grabs shown above. 

Another one taken with DSLR pointed at TV set, but this one is more a mix of teal and navy blue. 

This one shows the TV in the same view as my Richard Eastman pottery piece which is sitting on the console beneath the TV.  Look at the center section of that pottery and you'll realize why we're after that paint color.

Eastman's work is described further in a post about local artists titled "Art that wows". 

Here are the corresponding Photoshop extractions, roughly from lightest to darkest.  The numbers on them are in Hex and can be converted using sites like this one. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I finally get around to tackling our double converging door-painting project and zeroing in on the best color for that, I will publish a post about it, much as I did with respect to the skylight color selection process (one of my most popular posts, that one). 

I'll close by embedding the Flexio commercial, just in case you'd like to see more of this gem (I can't comment on the efficacy of the sprayer itself because I haven't used it).