Seeing an old room in a new way
Ever since quarantine started, I’ve been using our home’s guest bedroom as my home office. I wedged my desk up against the window with a view, and the rest of the room was the queen-sized guest bed. I made it work, but it wasn’t great. Then my sweet and clever husband pointed out no one was coming to visit us anytime soon, and offered to haul out the bed so I could build my own little sitting/crafting area instead. How he could suggest something so obvious and yet unseen by me, I’ll never know. But how could make design easy, instead of overwhelming?
Off to Pinterest I went! The world of home decor opened up to me. And as I narrowed down my search terms to “Mom Cave” I found all sorts of delightful and ladylike options. So now I had a vibe, but I also needed a color scheme. Why try to create one, when the professionals have done it for me? I decided to go with Pantone’s 2022 Color of the Year “Very Peri” palette called “Amusements.” An aggressively cheerful offering of pinks, oranges, anchored with milky brown and grayish teal.
Challenging the inner design critic
I’ll admit I had some critical voices in my head warning me that picking an of-the-moment color scheme was foolish. Would I love a wingback recliner in Pink Fuchsia for years to come? Would that much Tawny Orange sear my retinas after awhile? Maybe. But something I’ve come to value, for my own mental health, are trends as evidence for my jerk brain that the world does change over time. When the days all seem the same, staring out from my home office window, knowing I can grab a new color trend and cuddle into it with a good book and my dogs is some form of anchoring relief.
Explore the palette yourself!
But what if you don’t want to commit an entire room design to this palette? Or simply can’t even if you did want to? One thing I really enjoyed exploring was the Golden Paints color mixer that Art Sherpa introduced me to in her video on Very Peri. You can practice mixing paint colors to get as close as you want to any shade you’re interested in. I had a great time mixing colors to get to the Amusements palette–which helped me out a ton when I painted some ombre canvases you see in the pic above. This was a remarkably soothing, material-free activity–Try it out for yourself!
Continue this Paint Party
If you’d like to learn more about painting in general, and how I learned and practiced painting during quarantine, check out my post on Painting in Plague Times With a Virtual Paint Party.
