May 11, 2025 • 31 mins
Dean dives deeper into the nuances of working with color, revealing how our perception shifts based on light and context. He explains the importance of using large paint samples on primed surfaces and viewing them under different lighting throughout the day. Dean breaks down the concept of mass tones and undertones in paint, recommending a simple hack: use physical swatches of cyan, magenta, and yellow—the primary reflective colors—to reveal hidden undertones in complex shades. He also highlights useful tools like color wheels and high-tech color identifiers to help you choose the perfect hue for any space.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
KFI AM six forty. You're listening to Dean Sharp The
House Whisper on demand on the iHeart Radio app.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
We broadcast live on Saturday mornings from six to eight
Pacific time and from Sunday mornings nine to noon Pacific time.
And as soon as we're done with the broadcast, those
broadcasts become our podcasts, which live on in Green Eternity
in the archives of our podcast which can be found anywhere.
(00:34):
You can find it on the iHeartRadio app, of course
for free. It's free everywhere the free iHeartRadio app. You
can also find it on whatever your favorite podcast place is,
whether that's Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen
to your favorite podcast. Just search for Home with Dean
Sharp or The House Whisper. You will find us. You'll
(00:57):
find us there. It's not a very common name, the
House Whisper. There are a few places that use the
house Whisper. There's a there's an interior design firm I
think in Atlanta that fixes up houses in prep for sale,
that stages houses for sale that's named House Whisper. And
I think there's a real estate inspector. Last time I
(01:18):
checked up in I think the Bay Area that uses
house Whisper to do real estate inspections, you know, pre
sale inspections. Nothing has neither one of those have anything
to do with what we do. We design custom homes
and every facet of a custom home outside inside the
whole thing. There is a house Whisper over in the
(01:42):
UK that I think actually talks to houses. I'm just saying, actually,
you know, kind of says things to the house and
says that the house says things back to him. And yeah,
I don't do that. I don't do that, although people
(02:03):
think I do, because when we come into your home,
it's it sometimes shocks and surprises people how much we
understand about their home that they've been living in for
thirty years that they didn't notice themselves. So anyway, I'm
just saying, I'm just saying on our podcast, wherever podcasts
are found, house Whisper, it's easy to find and very
(02:25):
likely put my name in there as well. Dean Dean Sharp,
it's me. You'll see me there, I'm there, and then
you can listen hundreds of episodes, all searchable by topic.
It's a home improvement reference library that we're building for
you there and by the way. If you're thinking, well,
that's all great, but what we really need is Dean
and Tina standing in our home. We'll serve up some coffee,
We'll give them a biscuit or two just to keep
(02:46):
their energy up, and then they can solve our problem
for us. Well, yeah, you can do that too. You
can book an in home design consult with me and
the tee. You just go to house Whisperer dot Design. Okay,
run a little behind and so I've got to catch Yeah,
but I'm gonna we're gonna dive back into this conversation
on color. Okay, so less than one task one, I
(03:09):
don't know, whatever you want to call it. Okay, Principal one.
When you are testing color samples, it is imperative, imperative
that you reproduce the final conditions as much as possible.
That means large samples back at your house, large samples
as large as possible in the target room, on the
(03:32):
target's surface, painted over primer, painted over primer. This is critical.
I'm going to talk about this sum on the other
side of the break. If you're changing the color of
a room, let's say, oh, right now, the room is blue,
but i'd like it to go like a shade of
canary yellow. Okay, do not bring canary yellow home and
(03:54):
put a sample of canary yellow on the blue wall.
Why mixed LightWave frequencies into your eyeballs. Suddenly guess what
blue and yellow mixed together create green? Yeah, it's gonna
be like ew. Okay, So what we have to do first?
(04:15):
If you know you're going to change the color of
a room, then get the primer up on the walls
and get the room white first. Then bring home your
color samples, then canary yellow. We'll have a fighting chance
of showing you what the end result might be. Canary
yellow with white next to it. Different, completely different than
(04:35):
if you paint canary yellow a splotch of it on
top of a blue wall. It is going to mess
with your eyeballs. Okay, I guarantee it. All right, I
got more of this. We'll talk a little bit more
in detail about that large samples, target room, target, surface,
painted over primer when we return.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI A six.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
So glad that you are with us on the program.
It is a privilege to spend some time with you
talking about this very important thing that you call home.
We're all about turning ordinary houses into extraordinary homes in
any way that we can. From a design, construction, DIY
architectural perspective. It's all here waiting for you. That's what
(05:25):
I'm all about, and so I'm happy to do it.
And we're talking about one of the trickiest things when
it comes to that kind of process today, and that
is color. Color colors are tricky. So before the break,
I told you this less than one, I mean, most
important fundamental thing. When you're testing color samples, it is
(05:47):
imperative that you reproduce the final condition as much as possible.
That's what I spent so much time at the beginning
of the show today, And if you missed any part
of the show, you should go back and listen to
it on the podcast. But I've spent so much time
explaining to you that color is all about various frequencies
(06:09):
of light waves getting into our eyes and then the
brain interpreting those wavelengths of light. And when there are
mixed wavelengths of light coming at various sizes, then the
brain struggles to interpret those and those colors change. Because
color is not an absolute it is a biological interpretation
(06:33):
of light inside your brain. So that means that every
single condition that changes changes a color, always always changes
a color. In fact, if you're sitting in a room
right now, it doesn't even matter what color. Even if
you think you just have white walls, you don't. You
don't have stark white walls. You may have bright whiteish walls.
(06:54):
But even if you're sitting in a room right now,
there is a difference in the color on the walls.
There's one wall in the room that has a lot
of bright light hitting it, and then there's another room
there's another wall, probably a wall that's adjacent to it,
that has less direct light coming to it, and so
it's darker. It's just literally a darker color. And you see,
(07:17):
so that changes and it keeps changing throughout the day.
So that's what I mean when I say testing a
color sample. And I'm serious when I tell you this,
because when we as designers are working out colors in
a room for a client, we really mess that room
up with samples. I mean we really do. We want
(07:37):
the largest possible sample on every wall that will be affected,
and we want to look at it on the target's surface.
Painted over primer, not painted over some other color. Okay,
painted over as white as possible to keep it things
as neutral as possible, the proper sheen, thechine that we're
(07:59):
going to use, and then we evaluate it. We evalue
it under multiple daylight conditions and multiple artificial lighting conditions.
So we look at that color in the morning, we
look at it at noon, we look at it in
the afternoon, we look at it at night when the
lights and lamps are on in the room, to make
sure this color is the one we want and that
(08:20):
it's going to work and perform as we wish in
all of those conditions. And if you think, wow, that's
a lot of work, and that's what you pay a
designer for to do that kind of investigation to make
sure that the colors do what they're supposed to do
because they keep changing. So I always speak of a
(08:41):
room in terms of colors, not the color. Hey what's
the color for this room? Well, we're going to pick
a particular color and then it's going to create colors
in this room all ways. And I want to make
sure those colors are all working when we want them
to work the way we want. Second lesson most colors.
(09:02):
Almost all of them have what we call a mass
tone and an undertone. Okay, the mass tone, just think
of it as the main color, like yellow, okay, yellow,
there you go. Okay, but you know if you've stood
at a paint store sample wall, that there are you know,
(09:24):
five hundred million versions of yellow. Okay. Why is that? Okay,
it's not because of the yellow. It's because which is
the mass tone, the main tone. I don't know. You
don't have to remember these terms. You just got to
remember the principal mass tone or the main color. And
there is a background color, which we call the undertone. Okay.
(09:46):
It is the undertone always that screws you up, always, always,
always it is the undertone. Uh. This is something that
Tina is the absolute queen of the union. On she
had and I've got a pretty dang good eye for color.
I mean, just patting myself on the back or a man.
(10:08):
For a designer, okay, for an architectural designer. I am
really good with color. But I pale all of my
gifts and powers, pale and bow the knee to the
mighty Tina. She has got an eye like unbelievable. I
will be struggling with two colors that I'm just trying
to narrow something down to. She'll come over and just
(10:29):
glance over my shoulder and she's like, well, that one
on the left's got a lot of redded and I'm
like and then suddenly I see it. I'm like, unbelievable.
I can't believe you do that so well anyway, it
is the undertone that always messes you up. The undertone.
Do you know what the undertone is? And so here
is our third lesson So lesson one, big samples in
(10:54):
the realistic setting, okay, as much as the finished setting
as possible. Lesson two. All paint colors have a mass tone,
a main color, and the undertone. And knowing the undertone
is what gives you real directional power. Okay, So how
do you find out what the undertone is? You don't
necessarily look forward in the name. The names are just
(11:17):
roofy stuff, right, and you're not gonna see it on
some color chart per se. But here is the key.
This is so exciting. You know what a primary color is?
A primary color are the three colors that are not
actually in the color spectrum, that are not actually a
(11:37):
blending of any other colors. They're simply the true colors,
and from those three colors, all other colors are created. Okay,
those three colors are red, blue, and yellow. Okay, not
not red blue and green. That's in that's on emissive
colors like on a TV. That's RGB. That's on a monitor.
(11:59):
Now that I'm talking about reflective colors, the kind of
stuff that we put on our walls, it's red, blue,
and yellow. More specifically, you've seen these letters before, cmy, cyan,
magenta and yellow. And yes, it's four things there. Cmyk
(12:20):
K is black. It's just we didn't use the B
because that confuses it with blue and other things. It
is it is CM. Why okay, cyan, magenta, and yellow.
Why is this important for you to understand what the
three primary colors are? And why is it important that
(12:43):
when you go to the paint store you actually have
a physical card, not your phone. Your phone's not gonna
work in this situation because it's a different kind of
color that it's projecting an actual piece of paper or
a card that has those three colors on it, Cyan,
(13:05):
magenta and yellow. Why is this important has to do
with the undertone, and I'll tell you right after.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM sixty.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Your Home with Dean Sharp, the house Whisperer. That's me.
I'm here every weekend helping you turn your ordinary house
into an extraordinary home. And we do it. We do
it by handing out advice, construction advice, DIY advice, design
advice most first and foremost, because, as I always say,
(13:43):
when it comes to transforming a home, design matters most.
Design matters most. And one of the things that happened
during the design process is the selection of colors. And
colors just can be such a hassle, such a heartache,
because they're confusing, and we are demystifying that process. I've
(14:06):
spent a lot of time during the show explaining to
you kind of the science of how color works. And
now we're into these very very tangible pieces of practical
advice for you. So far, the main rules are less
than one. When you're testing color samples, got to put
them in final conditions as much as possible. That means
you put them in the room that they're going in
(14:28):
large samples on white primered walls, not on some other
colored walls in the target room on the target surface,
painted over primer with the proper sheen, and then you
evaluate it in all conditions of life, day, night, afternoon,
artificial lighting, the whole thing. The second important lesson to
(14:49):
learn is that most colors in the paint store, almost
all of them exclusively save three, have a mass tone,
which means a primary color like oh, we're going to
paint the room blue or we're gonna do something in
a gold you know, the mass tone. And then there
is this pesky undertone. There's a secondary color there that
(15:12):
you don't see that is changing the way it works
in the room. And it is the undertone that is
almost always tweaking you when you bring that sample home
and you're like, oh my gosh, it looks so much
more golden in the store, and now it looks sick screen.
I don't understand it. It is the hidden undertone. So
(15:33):
just know that that's what's in the paint now. The
third lesson is that there are three primary colors. Now,
you computer people, I'm not talking about RGB red, green
and blue. That's for computer screens. That's not for IRL
in real life, okay, And this is the difference. This
(15:55):
is the difference between emissive colors like something that's being
projected at you with light behind it, like a computer
screen or your phone, okay, or reflective colors, and that's
where color is out there and light is bouncing off
of it, which is the rest of the world. Okay,
So understand that that there are three primary colors that
(16:17):
we use. It is c M Y, cyan, magenta, and yellow.
Now why is it important? I said this before the
break teased you. Why is it important that you go
to the paint store if you really want to understand
the color that you're looking for, that you go to
the paint store with not a screen on your phone
(16:40):
with this, but with cyan, yellow, and magenta on a
card or piece of paper printed boldly and beautifully. Those
primary colors, the primary colors are primary in that those
are the three colors that all other colors are mixed
and made from. Okay, The primary colors are not mixed
(17:01):
from anything else. They are that simple color and that only,
and there are only three in the gabillions of mixed
colors out there. Why is it important? But here you go,
because if you hold a mass tone primary color cyan,
magenta and yellow up to next to that complex mixed
(17:27):
color sample that you're looking at, it will reveal to
you magically. It will reveal to you the undertone. Now
what do I mean. Let's say you're picking a kind
of blue for your room or something somewhere. Cabinetry maybe
very popular these days. I love blue cabinets, love them.
(17:49):
So you're picking a kind of blue, and you're looking
at all these blues and you're like, I wish I
could figure out what the undertones are in these blues
that are making them look different. Well, if you take
true blue, the primary blue cyan, and you have that physically,
and you slide that cyan next to that mixed blue,
(18:13):
the presence of the cyan and the sample both hitting
your eye at the same time, will reveal to you,
Oh my gosh, there's brown in there. Oh my gosh,
it's red. Oh my gosh, it's yellow. Oh it's leaning
toward green. It will reveal the undertone to you. There
is no more important piece of advice I can give
you or color selecting samples than that. To understand color,
(18:38):
have the primary colors in your pocket, in your purse
with you, and hold them up next to Now, you
can also most good paint places will have a chart
with the primary colors that you can grab, but use it.
Use the primary colors, hold them up to the samples,
and boom, you will see the undertone starting to bleed out.
(19:03):
Suddenly you'll see all this red in there. Suddenly you'll
see brown, you'll see gray, you'll see green bleeding out,
and you'll know, hey, it's not going to be these
these are leaning in the wrong direction. I need these.
I want the warmer colors, or maybe not the warm
I want the cooler colors. I want the greens in there.
You'll know, you'll know, oh my gosh, it is a
(19:25):
life saving device. Okay, all right, those are the most
important parts. Now how about cheating and finding out selection
of colors. So when we come back, I'm going to
take the last segment of the show today and I'm
going to tell you about two really important tools. One
is a color wheel so that you understand complementary colors,
(19:48):
triads of colors, those kinds of things. And two, a
very very high tech tool for identifying that one color
that you saw in this place on the thing, this
place on the thing with the guy. You have a
way if you have one of these in your car,
or in your pocket or in your purse. If you
have this high tech tool, you'll be able to go
(20:10):
right up to it and identify exactly what that color is.
Take it right to the paint store, and bring that
color home with you. I don't care if you put
it on an animal, a wall, anything, a leaf of plant.
If you find the color that you adore, you can
bring it home with you you capture with this device.
We'll talk about it when we come back.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Thanks for joining us on the program. Here we are
at the end of another three hours, but we're not
done yet. Not yet, my friend, not yet. And please,
if you're just joining us, or if you've missed a
good portion of today's show, remember this broadcast is also
the House Whisper podcast. Just right after we go off
the air, it will be available wherever you're favorite podcasts
(21:00):
are found. You can listen to it anytime, anywhere on demand,
as many times as you need to. And there is
a lot of information on color and color theory today.
But here we are wrapping out at the end, and
I am making our final points so where are the
most important points so far? Number one, The color is
in your head. It is a biological response in our
(21:23):
heads to different wavelengths of light, which makes it tricky
because cheaps changing all the time. But we get our
arms around it by testing color samples in their home
condition the final conditions as much as possible, large samples,
target rooms in the target room, on the target surface
(21:44):
painted over white primer, not with the old color on
the wall, and then we look at it under daylight
and artificial conditions all times during the day and night
in order to understand it. Second lesson to repeat again.
Most colors, almost all of them, have what we call
a mass tone that means just the main color, like
(22:04):
you know, oh I'm blue, okay, But there's an undertone
underneath it. And it's that undertone that gives us problem.
That's why at the paint store, it just looked blue
at the store, and I brought it home and now
it's green. Or it looked blue at the store and
I brought it home and now it looks purple. Because
there's an undertone that leans towards the cool end of
the spectrum or the warm end of the spectrum. The
(22:26):
undertone is what always sneaks in and gives you the problem.
So how do you determine where the undertone is? Third principle,
there are only three primary colors cmy cyan, magenta and yellow,
or you know, blue, red, and yellow, but it's actually cyan, magenta,
(22:47):
and yellow. Have those colors on hand. Okay, not on
your phone, because that's a different quality of light on hand,
on a card, on a piece of paper. Grab one
of the charts from at the paint store. Hold the
suspect tone up to its true color. It's pure primary color,
(23:07):
so a blue sample. Hold it up to cyan, and
it will reveal the undertone to you. You'll see it,
you'll see what direction it's heading, and you'll make much
much better decisions at the paint store with the samples
that you are bringing home. And finally today, now there
are a couple of tools for picking colors. This is
(23:29):
not so much the you know, defining the color samples
properly at the store, but for picking colors in general.
Get yourself a color wheel. Now, this you can do
on your phone. Okay, because this is not again about
getting real specific with the tonality of a color. But
this is picking a color theme for a room. Because
(23:51):
of the spectrum of colors, there are complementary colors on
the color spectrum, and a color wheel is a device
you can also go down to a place like hobby
lobby or Joe Ann's or Michael's or an art store
and you can pick up a color wheel, an actual
physical color wheel, and you spin it around and you
can see it reveals complementary colors on a spectrum. So
(24:14):
like if you're like, well, my furniture is going to
be this color, what else will work in here with that?
And then you look at a triad or a dual
opposite color or a quad color. All of these kind
of configurations are revealed on this very small simple tool
that is a color wheel. Color wheels will cost you
(24:34):
five bucks. Okay, you can order one on Amazon today
and it'll be here this afternoon or tomorrow, and then
you can use it. You can also and like I said,
because we're not comparing real specific color shades, you can
also download a color wheel app on your phone. And
the app that I use is literally called color Wheel,
(24:57):
and you can download it and you can use that
for preferences and then use the primary color card like
I said, when you're actually at the store zeroing in
on the samples that you're wanting to target. So a
color wheel. And finally, this is a very high tech tool.
And this one's gonna set you back ninety eight dollars. Okay,
(25:20):
go to online, go to a nixsensor dot com, nixsensor
dot com, nixsensor dot com, and take a look at
the Nix Mini three. It's the third generation of the
Knicks Mini Sensor. This is a pocket color analyzer. And
(25:42):
I say pocket because it is about it is about
the size of a walnut. That's it. It pairs to
an app on your phone. And this Nixcolor sensor, it
is so so dang accurate, and it is so effective.
It literally enables you. It's all charged up. Keep it
in your purse, keep it in your pocket, keep it
(26:02):
in the car when you're out looking for stuff. It
literally allows you to walk up to any surface, anything
at all. Okay, Like, oh, I love the brown on
that leather sofa. I wish that was the color that
we could paint the cabinet. Well, pull out your next sensor,
open up the app on your phone, walk over, push
(26:23):
the next sensor. Onto the surface of that brown leather sofa,
and within two seconds you will have that exact color
fully analyzed into breakdown of scientific colors CMYK Pantone colors.
But best of all, the Knick's Library has ga billions
(26:44):
of all the major paint shades of the major paint brand.
So mine, of course, is set to Benjamin Moore, and
so I will put that NIX sensor. You tell me, Dean.
At this store, I was just shopping for furniture, there's
a table. This table is kind of a brownish gray.
I love this color. That's the color that I want
(27:07):
on my cabinets. I don't know how to get it.
And it's like, tell me the store I'm going in.
I find the table, I put the nick Sensor down there,
and boom, it shows me the top three matching shades
and colors of the current Benjamin Moore color lineup in
all of their paints. It is such, it is such
(27:28):
a cheat. I hesitate to tell you because it makes
me look like a wizard. But the fact of the
matter is, you know, it's all transparency, full disclosure. Here
for ninety eight bucks, you can have this amazing device
in your pocket. I think most places. I think, if
you go to Nix, it's just the Mini three sensor,
it's gonna set you back one hundred bucks. And but
(27:51):
it's a game changer. It is a game changer. You
can put it on a pet, you know, like, oh,
I love the I love that kind of blackish brown
on my pet's nose. Just stick it on his nose
for a half second. You'll find out what that color is.
It is so so voud. Oh. If you're patching, like
you've got a room, You're like, I don't want to
change the color of the room. But this room, this
white paint in here is like fifteen years old and
(28:13):
it's bleached in the sun. And now we've got this
little area up here of damage. I don't have the
paint anymore. What can I do? Put the knick sensor
right up next to the damage on the good paint.
Still register it. You'll go get a tiny little sample
from the paint store. It's going to match, and you'll
be able to patch that little hole without repainting the
(28:34):
whole wall. Anyway. There you go, my friends, A crash
course in color theory and the practicalities of choosing color
for your home. And the tools to get it all
done in Ah, there you have it all right. Hey,
it's Mother's Day today. I'm just going to leave you
(28:55):
this very very short thought. Motherhood is hard. You know,
that's no news to anyone. It is not a sprint.
It is a marathon. It's often a very very thankless job.
And what's even harder is you know you have no
control over the results because you know, just like we did,
(29:15):
kids grow up under good circumstances, under bad circumstances. But
even under the best of parenting circumstances, kids grow up,
they make their own decisions, and they become their own people.
Motherhood is tough. It can also be deeply, deeply rewarding.
And today is the day that we just celebrate it
for all that it is, in all of its beauty,
(29:38):
in all of it goles, in all of it's imperfection.
And the fact is, you know what, for most moms,
it's simply unavoidable because it's built in and it's who
you are. It's the nature of he who you are.
I love this quote from the author Robert Heinlein. He said,
motherhood is not a biological relation. It is ultimately lee
(30:00):
an attitude and you know what, that's so true. You
can pick the mothers out of the crowd anytime, any
day of the week. It's not about biology. It's about
an attitude, and they carry it with them and they
do it every day without fanfare, and they do it
well well. Today is the day. Today is the day
for us to give a little fanfare for all the
(30:23):
moms out there, and I honor you and I wish
you the very very best of Mothers days today. And
for all of you who have moms, which is literally
one hundred percent of us, make it happen. Reach out
to the moms in your life and make sure they
know that they have not expended this energy in vain
(30:46):
that you have noticed and that you know it's true.
And with that, I encourage you all to get out
there in this beautiful, warm, sunny Southern California day, or
whatever the weather is like wherever you are across our
beautiful nation, and as always, get busy building yourself a
beautiful life. And we will see you right back here
(31:06):
next weekend.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper.
Tune into the live broadcast on KFI AM six forty
every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and
every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or
anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app
KFI AM six forty. You're listening to Dean Sharp The
House Whisper on demand on the iHeart Radio app.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
We broadcast live on Saturday mornings from six to eight
Pacific time and from Sunday mornings nine to noon Pacific time.
And as soon as we're done with the broadcast, those
broadcasts become our podcasts, which live on in Green Eternity
in the archives of our podcast which can be found anywhere.
(00:34):
You can find it on the iHeartRadio app, of course
for free. It's free everywhere the free iHeartRadio app. You
can also find it on whatever your favorite podcast place is,
whether that's Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen
to your favorite podcast. Just search for Home with Dean
Sharp or The House Whisper. You will find us. You'll
(00:57):
find us there. It's not a very common name, the
House Whisper. There are a few places that use the
house Whisper. There's a there's an interior design firm I
think in Atlanta that fixes up houses in prep for sale,
that stages houses for sale that's named House Whisper. And
I think there's a real estate inspector. Last time I
(01:18):
checked up in I think the Bay Area that uses
house Whisper to do real estate inspections, you know, pre
sale inspections. Nothing has neither one of those have anything
to do with what we do. We design custom homes
and every facet of a custom home outside inside the
whole thing. There is a house Whisper over in the
(01:42):
UK that I think actually talks to houses. I'm just saying, actually,
you know, kind of says things to the house and
says that the house says things back to him. And yeah,
I don't do that. I don't do that, although people
(02:03):
think I do, because when we come into your home,
it's it sometimes shocks and surprises people how much we
understand about their home that they've been living in for
thirty years that they didn't notice themselves. So anyway, I'm
just saying, I'm just saying on our podcast, wherever podcasts
are found, house Whisper, it's easy to find and very
(02:25):
likely put my name in there as well. Dean Dean Sharp,
it's me. You'll see me there, I'm there, and then
you can listen hundreds of episodes, all searchable by topic.
It's a home improvement reference library that we're building for
you there and by the way. If you're thinking, well,
that's all great, but what we really need is Dean
and Tina standing in our home. We'll serve up some coffee,
We'll give them a biscuit or two just to keep
(02:46):
their energy up, and then they can solve our problem
for us. Well, yeah, you can do that too. You
can book an in home design consult with me and
the tee. You just go to house Whisperer dot Design. Okay,
run a little behind and so I've got to catch Yeah,
but I'm gonna we're gonna dive back into this conversation
on color. Okay, so less than one task one, I
(03:09):
don't know, whatever you want to call it. Okay, Principal one.
When you are testing color samples, it is imperative, imperative
that you reproduce the final conditions as much as possible.
That means large samples back at your house, large samples
as large as possible in the target room, on the
(03:32):
target's surface, painted over primer, painted over primer. This is critical.
I'm going to talk about this sum on the other
side of the break. If you're changing the color of
a room, let's say, oh, right now, the room is blue,
but i'd like it to go like a shade of
canary yellow. Okay, do not bring canary yellow home and
(03:54):
put a sample of canary yellow on the blue wall.
Why mixed LightWave frequencies into your eyeballs. Suddenly guess what
blue and yellow mixed together create green? Yeah, it's gonna
be like ew. Okay, So what we have to do first?
(04:15):
If you know you're going to change the color of
a room, then get the primer up on the walls
and get the room white first. Then bring home your
color samples, then canary yellow. We'll have a fighting chance
of showing you what the end result might be. Canary
yellow with white next to it. Different, completely different than
(04:35):
if you paint canary yellow a splotch of it on
top of a blue wall. It is going to mess
with your eyeballs. Okay, I guarantee it. All right, I
got more of this. We'll talk a little bit more
in detail about that large samples, target room, target, surface,
painted over primer when we return.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI A six.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
So glad that you are with us on the program.
It is a privilege to spend some time with you
talking about this very important thing that you call home.
We're all about turning ordinary houses into extraordinary homes in
any way that we can. From a design, construction, DIY
architectural perspective. It's all here waiting for you. That's what
(05:25):
I'm all about, and so I'm happy to do it.
And we're talking about one of the trickiest things when
it comes to that kind of process today, and that
is color. Color colors are tricky. So before the break,
I told you this less than one, I mean, most
important fundamental thing. When you're testing color samples, it is
(05:47):
imperative that you reproduce the final condition as much as possible.
That's what I spent so much time at the beginning
of the show today, And if you missed any part
of the show, you should go back and listen to
it on the podcast. But I've spent so much time
explaining to you that color is all about various frequencies
(06:09):
of light waves getting into our eyes and then the
brain interpreting those wavelengths of light. And when there are
mixed wavelengths of light coming at various sizes, then the
brain struggles to interpret those and those colors change. Because
color is not an absolute it is a biological interpretation
(06:33):
of light inside your brain. So that means that every
single condition that changes changes a color, always always changes
a color. In fact, if you're sitting in a room
right now, it doesn't even matter what color. Even if
you think you just have white walls, you don't. You
don't have stark white walls. You may have bright whiteish walls.
(06:54):
But even if you're sitting in a room right now,
there is a difference in the color on the walls.
There's one wall in the room that has a lot
of bright light hitting it, and then there's another room
there's another wall, probably a wall that's adjacent to it,
that has less direct light coming to it, and so
it's darker. It's just literally a darker color. And you see,
(07:17):
so that changes and it keeps changing throughout the day.
So that's what I mean when I say testing a
color sample. And I'm serious when I tell you this,
because when we as designers are working out colors in
a room for a client, we really mess that room
up with samples. I mean we really do. We want
(07:37):
the largest possible sample on every wall that will be affected,
and we want to look at it on the target's surface.
Painted over primer, not painted over some other color. Okay,
painted over as white as possible to keep it things
as neutral as possible, the proper sheen, thechine that we're
(07:59):
going to use, and then we evaluate it. We evalue
it under multiple daylight conditions and multiple artificial lighting conditions.
So we look at that color in the morning, we
look at it at noon, we look at it in
the afternoon, we look at it at night when the
lights and lamps are on in the room, to make
sure this color is the one we want and that
(08:20):
it's going to work and perform as we wish in
all of those conditions. And if you think, wow, that's
a lot of work, and that's what you pay a
designer for to do that kind of investigation to make
sure that the colors do what they're supposed to do
because they keep changing. So I always speak of a
(08:41):
room in terms of colors, not the color. Hey what's
the color for this room? Well, we're going to pick
a particular color and then it's going to create colors
in this room all ways. And I want to make
sure those colors are all working when we want them
to work the way we want. Second lesson most colors.
(09:02):
Almost all of them have what we call a mass
tone and an undertone. Okay, the mass tone, just think
of it as the main color, like yellow, okay, yellow,
there you go. Okay, but you know if you've stood
at a paint store sample wall, that there are you know,
(09:24):
five hundred million versions of yellow. Okay. Why is that? Okay,
it's not because of the yellow. It's because which is
the mass tone, the main tone. I don't know. You
don't have to remember these terms. You just got to
remember the principal mass tone or the main color. And
there is a background color, which we call the undertone. Okay.
(09:46):
It is the undertone always that screws you up, always, always,
always it is the undertone. Uh. This is something that
Tina is the absolute queen of the union. On she
had and I've got a pretty dang good eye for color.
I mean, just patting myself on the back or a man.
(10:08):
For a designer, okay, for an architectural designer. I am
really good with color. But I pale all of my
gifts and powers, pale and bow the knee to the
mighty Tina. She has got an eye like unbelievable. I
will be struggling with two colors that I'm just trying
to narrow something down to. She'll come over and just
(10:29):
glance over my shoulder and she's like, well, that one
on the left's got a lot of redded and I'm
like and then suddenly I see it. I'm like, unbelievable.
I can't believe you do that so well anyway, it
is the undertone that always messes you up. The undertone.
Do you know what the undertone is? And so here
is our third lesson So lesson one, big samples in
(10:54):
the realistic setting, okay, as much as the finished setting
as possible. Lesson two. All paint colors have a mass tone,
a main color, and the undertone. And knowing the undertone
is what gives you real directional power. Okay, So how
do you find out what the undertone is? You don't
necessarily look forward in the name. The names are just
(11:17):
roofy stuff, right, and you're not gonna see it on
some color chart per se. But here is the key.
This is so exciting. You know what a primary color is?
A primary color are the three colors that are not
actually in the color spectrum, that are not actually a
(11:37):
blending of any other colors. They're simply the true colors,
and from those three colors, all other colors are created. Okay,
those three colors are red, blue, and yellow. Okay, not
not red blue and green. That's in that's on emissive
colors like on a TV. That's RGB. That's on a monitor.
(11:59):
Now that I'm talking about reflective colors, the kind of
stuff that we put on our walls, it's red, blue,
and yellow. More specifically, you've seen these letters before, cmy, cyan,
magenta and yellow. And yes, it's four things there. Cmyk
(12:20):
K is black. It's just we didn't use the B
because that confuses it with blue and other things. It
is it is CM. Why okay, cyan, magenta, and yellow.
Why is this important for you to understand what the
three primary colors are? And why is it important that
(12:43):
when you go to the paint store you actually have
a physical card, not your phone. Your phone's not gonna
work in this situation because it's a different kind of
color that it's projecting an actual piece of paper or
a card that has those three colors on it, Cyan,
(13:05):
magenta and yellow. Why is this important has to do
with the undertone, and I'll tell you right after.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM sixty.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Your Home with Dean Sharp, the house Whisperer. That's me.
I'm here every weekend helping you turn your ordinary house
into an extraordinary home. And we do it. We do
it by handing out advice, construction advice, DIY advice, design
advice most first and foremost, because, as I always say,
(13:43):
when it comes to transforming a home, design matters most.
Design matters most. And one of the things that happened
during the design process is the selection of colors. And
colors just can be such a hassle, such a heartache,
because they're confusing, and we are demystifying that process. I've
(14:06):
spent a lot of time during the show explaining to
you kind of the science of how color works. And
now we're into these very very tangible pieces of practical
advice for you. So far, the main rules are less
than one. When you're testing color samples, got to put
them in final conditions as much as possible. That means
you put them in the room that they're going in
(14:28):
large samples on white primered walls, not on some other
colored walls in the target room on the target surface,
painted over primer with the proper sheen, and then you
evaluate it in all conditions of life, day, night, afternoon,
artificial lighting, the whole thing. The second important lesson to
(14:49):
learn is that most colors in the paint store, almost
all of them exclusively save three, have a mass tone,
which means a primary color like oh, we're going to
paint the room blue or we're gonna do something in
a gold you know, the mass tone. And then there
is this pesky undertone. There's a secondary color there that
(15:12):
you don't see that is changing the way it works
in the room. And it is the undertone that is
almost always tweaking you when you bring that sample home
and you're like, oh my gosh, it looks so much
more golden in the store, and now it looks sick screen.
I don't understand it. It is the hidden undertone. So
(15:33):
just know that that's what's in the paint now. The
third lesson is that there are three primary colors. Now,
you computer people, I'm not talking about RGB red, green
and blue. That's for computer screens. That's not for IRL
in real life, okay, And this is the difference. This
(15:55):
is the difference between emissive colors like something that's being
projected at you with light behind it, like a computer
screen or your phone, okay, or reflective colors, and that's
where color is out there and light is bouncing off
of it, which is the rest of the world. Okay,
So understand that that there are three primary colors that
(16:17):
we use. It is c M Y, cyan, magenta, and yellow.
Now why is it important? I said this before the
break teased you. Why is it important that you go
to the paint store if you really want to understand
the color that you're looking for, that you go to
the paint store with not a screen on your phone
(16:40):
with this, but with cyan, yellow, and magenta on a
card or piece of paper printed boldly and beautifully. Those
primary colors, the primary colors are primary in that those
are the three colors that all other colors are mixed
and made from. Okay, The primary colors are not mixed
(17:01):
from anything else. They are that simple color and that only,
and there are only three in the gabillions of mixed
colors out there. Why is it important? But here you go,
because if you hold a mass tone primary color cyan,
magenta and yellow up to next to that complex mixed
(17:27):
color sample that you're looking at, it will reveal to
you magically. It will reveal to you the undertone. Now
what do I mean. Let's say you're picking a kind
of blue for your room or something somewhere. Cabinetry maybe
very popular these days. I love blue cabinets, love them.
(17:49):
So you're picking a kind of blue, and you're looking
at all these blues and you're like, I wish I
could figure out what the undertones are in these blues
that are making them look different. Well, if you take
true blue, the primary blue cyan, and you have that physically,
and you slide that cyan next to that mixed blue,
(18:13):
the presence of the cyan and the sample both hitting
your eye at the same time, will reveal to you,
Oh my gosh, there's brown in there. Oh my gosh,
it's red. Oh my gosh, it's yellow. Oh it's leaning
toward green. It will reveal the undertone to you. There
is no more important piece of advice I can give
you or color selecting samples than that. To understand color,
(18:38):
have the primary colors in your pocket, in your purse
with you, and hold them up next to Now, you
can also most good paint places will have a chart
with the primary colors that you can grab, but use it.
Use the primary colors, hold them up to the samples,
and boom, you will see the undertone starting to bleed out.
(19:03):
Suddenly you'll see all this red in there. Suddenly you'll
see brown, you'll see gray, you'll see green bleeding out,
and you'll know, hey, it's not going to be these
these are leaning in the wrong direction. I need these.
I want the warmer colors, or maybe not the warm
I want the cooler colors. I want the greens in there.
You'll know, you'll know, oh my gosh, it is a
(19:25):
life saving device. Okay, all right, those are the most
important parts. Now how about cheating and finding out selection
of colors. So when we come back, I'm going to
take the last segment of the show today and I'm
going to tell you about two really important tools. One
is a color wheel so that you understand complementary colors,
(19:48):
triads of colors, those kinds of things. And two, a
very very high tech tool for identifying that one color
that you saw in this place on the thing, this
place on the thing with the guy. You have a
way if you have one of these in your car,
or in your pocket or in your purse. If you
have this high tech tool, you'll be able to go
(20:10):
right up to it and identify exactly what that color is.
Take it right to the paint store, and bring that
color home with you. I don't care if you put
it on an animal, a wall, anything, a leaf of plant.
If you find the color that you adore, you can
bring it home with you you capture with this device.
We'll talk about it when we come back.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Thanks for joining us on the program. Here we are
at the end of another three hours, but we're not
done yet. Not yet, my friend, not yet. And please,
if you're just joining us, or if you've missed a
good portion of today's show, remember this broadcast is also
the House Whisper podcast. Just right after we go off
the air, it will be available wherever you're favorite podcasts
(21:00):
are found. You can listen to it anytime, anywhere on demand,
as many times as you need to. And there is
a lot of information on color and color theory today.
But here we are wrapping out at the end, and
I am making our final points so where are the
most important points so far? Number one, The color is
in your head. It is a biological response in our
(21:23):
heads to different wavelengths of light, which makes it tricky
because cheaps changing all the time. But we get our
arms around it by testing color samples in their home
condition the final conditions as much as possible, large samples,
target rooms in the target room, on the target surface
(21:44):
painted over white primer, not with the old color on
the wall, and then we look at it under daylight
and artificial conditions all times during the day and night
in order to understand it. Second lesson to repeat again.
Most colors, almost all of them, have what we call
a mass tone that means just the main color, like
(22:04):
you know, oh I'm blue, okay, But there's an undertone
underneath it. And it's that undertone that gives us problem.
That's why at the paint store, it just looked blue
at the store, and I brought it home and now
it's green. Or it looked blue at the store and
I brought it home and now it looks purple. Because
there's an undertone that leans towards the cool end of
the spectrum or the warm end of the spectrum. The
(22:26):
undertone is what always sneaks in and gives you the problem.
So how do you determine where the undertone is? Third principle,
there are only three primary colors cmy cyan, magenta and yellow,
or you know, blue, red, and yellow, but it's actually cyan, magenta,
(22:47):
and yellow. Have those colors on hand. Okay, not on
your phone, because that's a different quality of light on hand,
on a card, on a piece of paper. Grab one
of the charts from at the paint store. Hold the
suspect tone up to its true color. It's pure primary color,
(23:07):
so a blue sample. Hold it up to cyan, and
it will reveal the undertone to you. You'll see it,
you'll see what direction it's heading, and you'll make much
much better decisions at the paint store with the samples
that you are bringing home. And finally today, now there
are a couple of tools for picking colors. This is
(23:29):
not so much the you know, defining the color samples
properly at the store, but for picking colors in general.
Get yourself a color wheel. Now, this you can do
on your phone. Okay, because this is not again about
getting real specific with the tonality of a color. But
this is picking a color theme for a room. Because
(23:51):
of the spectrum of colors, there are complementary colors on
the color spectrum, and a color wheel is a device
you can also go down to a place like hobby
lobby or Joe Ann's or Michael's or an art store
and you can pick up a color wheel, an actual
physical color wheel, and you spin it around and you
can see it reveals complementary colors on a spectrum. So
(24:14):
like if you're like, well, my furniture is going to
be this color, what else will work in here with that?
And then you look at a triad or a dual
opposite color or a quad color. All of these kind
of configurations are revealed on this very small simple tool
that is a color wheel. Color wheels will cost you
(24:34):
five bucks. Okay, you can order one on Amazon today
and it'll be here this afternoon or tomorrow, and then
you can use it. You can also and like I said,
because we're not comparing real specific color shades, you can
also download a color wheel app on your phone. And
the app that I use is literally called color Wheel,
(24:57):
and you can download it and you can use that
for preferences and then use the primary color card like
I said, when you're actually at the store zeroing in
on the samples that you're wanting to target. So a
color wheel. And finally, this is a very high tech tool.
And this one's gonna set you back ninety eight dollars. Okay,
(25:20):
go to online, go to a nixsensor dot com, nixsensor
dot com, nixsensor dot com, and take a look at
the Nix Mini three. It's the third generation of the
Knicks Mini Sensor. This is a pocket color analyzer. And
(25:42):
I say pocket because it is about it is about
the size of a walnut. That's it. It pairs to
an app on your phone. And this Nixcolor sensor, it
is so so dang accurate, and it is so effective.
It literally enables you. It's all charged up. Keep it
in your purse, keep it in your pocket, keep it
(26:02):
in the car when you're out looking for stuff. It
literally allows you to walk up to any surface, anything
at all. Okay, Like, oh, I love the brown on
that leather sofa. I wish that was the color that
we could paint the cabinet. Well, pull out your next sensor,
open up the app on your phone, walk over, push
(26:23):
the next sensor. Onto the surface of that brown leather sofa,
and within two seconds you will have that exact color
fully analyzed into breakdown of scientific colors CMYK Pantone colors.
But best of all, the Knick's Library has ga billions
(26:44):
of all the major paint shades of the major paint brand.
So mine, of course, is set to Benjamin Moore, and
so I will put that NIX sensor. You tell me, Dean.
At this store, I was just shopping for furniture, there's
a table. This table is kind of a brownish gray.
I love this color. That's the color that I want
(27:07):
on my cabinets. I don't know how to get it.
And it's like, tell me the store I'm going in.
I find the table, I put the nick Sensor down there,
and boom, it shows me the top three matching shades
and colors of the current Benjamin Moore color lineup in
all of their paints. It is such, it is such
(27:28):
a cheat. I hesitate to tell you because it makes
me look like a wizard. But the fact of the
matter is, you know, it's all transparency, full disclosure. Here
for ninety eight bucks, you can have this amazing device
in your pocket. I think most places. I think, if
you go to Nix, it's just the Mini three sensor,
it's gonna set you back one hundred bucks. And but
(27:51):
it's a game changer. It is a game changer. You
can put it on a pet, you know, like, oh,
I love the I love that kind of blackish brown
on my pet's nose. Just stick it on his nose
for a half second. You'll find out what that color is.
It is so so voud. Oh. If you're patching, like
you've got a room, You're like, I don't want to
change the color of the room. But this room, this
white paint in here is like fifteen years old and
(28:13):
it's bleached in the sun. And now we've got this
little area up here of damage. I don't have the
paint anymore. What can I do? Put the knick sensor
right up next to the damage on the good paint.
Still register it. You'll go get a tiny little sample
from the paint store. It's going to match, and you'll
be able to patch that little hole without repainting the
(28:34):
whole wall. Anyway. There you go, my friends, A crash
course in color theory and the practicalities of choosing color
for your home. And the tools to get it all
done in Ah, there you have it all right. Hey,
it's Mother's Day today. I'm just going to leave you
(28:55):
this very very short thought. Motherhood is hard. You know,
that's no news to anyone. It is not a sprint.
It is a marathon. It's often a very very thankless job.
And what's even harder is you know you have no
control over the results because you know, just like we did,
(29:15):
kids grow up under good circumstances, under bad circumstances. But
even under the best of parenting circumstances, kids grow up,
they make their own decisions, and they become their own people.
Motherhood is tough. It can also be deeply, deeply rewarding.
And today is the day that we just celebrate it
for all that it is, in all of its beauty,
(29:38):
in all of it goles, in all of it's imperfection.
And the fact is, you know what, for most moms,
it's simply unavoidable because it's built in and it's who
you are. It's the nature of he who you are.
I love this quote from the author Robert Heinlein. He said,
motherhood is not a biological relation. It is ultimately lee
(30:00):
an attitude and you know what, that's so true. You
can pick the mothers out of the crowd anytime, any
day of the week. It's not about biology. It's about
an attitude, and they carry it with them and they
do it every day without fanfare, and they do it
well well. Today is the day. Today is the day
for us to give a little fanfare for all the
(30:23):
moms out there, and I honor you and I wish
you the very very best of Mothers days today. And
for all of you who have moms, which is literally
one hundred percent of us, make it happen. Reach out
to the moms in your life and make sure they
know that they have not expended this energy in vain
(30:46):
that you have noticed and that you know it's true.
And with that, I encourage you all to get out
there in this beautiful, warm, sunny Southern California day, or
whatever the weather is like wherever you are across our
beautiful nation, and as always, get busy building yourself a
beautiful life. And we will see you right back here
(31:06):
next weekend.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper.
Tune into the live broadcast on KFI AM six forty
every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and
every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or
anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app
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