What goes with ugly green?

April 5, 2009 12:48 PM

Home Decorating: Point me in the right direction for an on-line tool that will help me choose a new color scheme for my apartment. I've found several that show you paint colors, but none with a certain feature I hope to find.

I'm hoping to find a site that will let you plug in a couple of given colors (for example, my ugly green couch that has to stay) and then will show you a selection of color palettes built around those one or two particular colors. I'd love to find some fresh colors that will let me look at my old green sofa in a new way. Is such a thing available?

posted by SweetTeaAndABiscuit to home & garden (13 comments total)

I don't know of any websites, but if you post pictures of your room and couch, I'd be happy to offer advice. There's lots of artsy types here, so I bet others will too.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:02 PM on April 5

You could just put a slipcover on the couch instead of being tied to the couch's color scheme. So long as the couch isn't a weird shape, finding a slipcover should be easy.

Perhaps you have some other reason why a slipcover wouldn't work. If that's the case, then I second 5-13-23's suggestion: post some picks and let the HiveMind have at it!
posted by LOLAttorney2009 at 1:11 PM on April 5

What goes with ugly green?

Lots of neutral colors go with ugly green and then once you're rid of the ugly couch you'd have a lovely base to add things to. Paint swatches/chips are free (at least in the US); get yourself to Home Depot or Lowe's or Sherwin Williams or wherever and load up and bring 'em home. See what you like and go from there. The best thing about paint? SO easy to change if you hate it.
posted by cooker girl at 1:18 PM on April 5

This is a sort of labor-intensive way about finding good colors, but the CS3 version of abobe illustrator will give you a palette of complementing colors when you choose one color. If you took a picture of you couch, pulled it into illustrator and used the eyedropper tool to figure out the color of the couch, the program will spit out either 5 or 6 colors that go well with it. You could print out a page from illustrator and match it to paint swatches at the store.
posted by mjcon at 1:41 PM on April 5

This isn't a painting-related tool, but the COLOURlovers blog is a place where designers share lots of gorgeous palettes of colour.

1) Search colours: Use their search tool to find a close match for your shade of ugly green. (Note that you have to use two sliders for hue and two sliders for brightness to indicate the ranges you want.)

I used this search to find some choices close to AskMe green. Click any green in the list to see responses using that shade. From the list of results, I found the palette for Baby Bok Choy, which may be a little too much green for anyone. On my second search, I used the red-orange-yellow-green range, with the same range for brightness, to get a list that included this palette.

2) Search palettes: use this tool to find any palettes using one, two or more basic colours. This search using green, red and yellow led to lots of results, including this one.

You can also just browse to find interesting palettes, then go to the store with some colours that can be pretty closely matched.
posted by maudlin at 2:07 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

This Behr site will let you do some color coordinating. It won't take into account where natural light is coming from, or lamps. It makes a big difference. Google's sketchup will let you design a room and flood areas with color, but you won't get nuance.

Get lots of paint chips, and stare at them in different combinations. Decide how you want the room to feel. Then post pics for people to critique and suggest. Doing a good paint job is not that easy, but once done, it's easy to repaint, so go ahead and take risks. Ugly green is in style, so that's a plus.
posted by theora55 at 2:18 PM on April 5

I think you might find this online color picker very helpful. It's got a lot of features and you can tweak it till you get it just the way you like it.
posted by watercarrier at 2:20 PM on April 5

This may be crazy, but there are some website color scheme generators out there that may be helpful. This is one of them. Pick the green that's closest to your couch, then see what it does. If nothing else, it's fun to play with.
posted by misskaz at 2:34 PM on April 5

If you send photos to Apartment Therapy, they'll often post them with requests for suggestions. Or yeah - post here. Lots of people have painting/home decorating experience.
posted by barnone at 2:42 PM on April 5

This Sherwin-Williams visualizer has the ability to choose the color of the couch and other items in the room. You can't upload your photos but you pick a layout/lighting scheme similar to yours, change the color of couches and chairs, and go from there.
posted by barnone at 2:44 PM on April 5

Post the couch. (Green is my favorite colour to work with!)
posted by mu~ha~ha~ha~har at 3:40 PM on April 5

I think you're going to be disappointed with most of the sites intended for interior decorating. They're going to give you color combinations similar to what your neighbors and parents have, and you're trying to look at your sofa in a new way. So, I'd stick with color generators like the one misskaz suggested (love that one!), or try a different approach:

1. Find some artwork that you really like that blends reasonable well or at least doesn't look hideous with the sofa. Pick out other interior colors from the artwork.

2. Pick a color that you really like, purple, red, blue, gold, whatever. Pick a shade of that color that works with the sofa - similar in saturation, tone, etc. Find a neutral that works with both. For example, with green, I'd probably try to use eggplant and taupe, since I love purple to distraction. My sister would figure out how to make orange or gold work somehow. My mother-in-law would do terra cotta and cream. (My other mother-in-law would give away the green sofa and buy something brown.)

3. Post pictures!!
posted by zinfandel at 4:27 PM on April 5 [2 favorites]

Color Schemer is another tool where you can feed in a color & it gives complimentary colors.

Also, what I do to find good, natural color schemes, is to find photos (on flickr or other sites) that I like (and contain the target colors) and then using the image editor of my choice, I resize them down using the "Bicubic" option so that it's no more than 10 pixels per side. Then I bring them back up to normal size using the "Nearest Neighbor" option.

This reduces the scene down to a couple dozen large swaths of color that are complimentary & somewhat unexpected using pure color theory like these online options.

Some googling turned up this blog posts, which points to some tools that may do it for you.
posted by MesoFilter at 11:36 AM on April 6