There’s so much colour in the world! Too much, in fact, to cover all of the colours of the year we wanted to touch on in just one blog post. In our last post, we covered some of the warmer colours, including Pantone’s Living Coral. Today, we’re going to look at the colours of the year from three different paint companies. In our next blog post, we’re going to touch on trends, and discuss where they stem from, and where they go to. Now, onto the colours!
Benjamin Moore’s colour of the year is Metropolitan, a gray with cool undertones. The choice of a gray as colour of the year is pretty interesting; it strikes me as simultaneously uninspired and daring. Gray is a mainstay of modern interior painting, because it’s so incredibly versatile, and Metropolitan is no exception. You can use it to paint a whole master bedroom, you could use it on trim, and you complement it with deep blues and greens or creams. The reason it strikes me as a bold choice is that most other colours of the year are somewhat striking, while Metropolitan has a subtle elegance about it. The reason it strikes me as uninspired is, well, it’s gray, and gray will be the actual colour of the year for years to come; people love grays.
I particularly love Behr’s colour of the year, a deep, soothing blue with a hint of green called “Blueprint”. Like all of the other colours we’ve seen so far this year, Blueprint is incredibly versatile; you can use it to accent, or to paint a whole room. The colour is at beautiful middle ground for playing with palettes; it’s as well suited to a room with navy blues as it is to a room with pastel pinks. The colour feels incredibly natural and relaxing, in some ways a blue sibling to another colour we’ve seen given the COTY title, Night Watch.
Here’s an interesting fact you may not know; Dulux Paints Colour of the Year is also Night Watch. Why do they have the same favorite colour this year as PPG? Well, as it turns out, PPG bought Dulux’s paint business in the United States. That’s why you end up with two paint companies having the same favorite colour this year, an interesting aside I thought some readers would enjoy!
Now that we’ve looked at all of the colours of the year, what can we learn from the present trends? I think that the answer lies in calm, soothing colours; our warm and cool colours this year are all soothing, even when they’re invigorating, calming even when they catch the eye. This may be because we’re living in a particularly turbulent time, so colours that bring us back to nature and relax us can have a positive effect on our psyche. When our collective psyches are influenced in this way, can it bring about social change? That’s not for me to say, but I do know this: whatever colour you choose, experienced Winnipeg painters are at the ready to make your home look beautiful.
