Six rules #2

 

    2.  Don’t let anyone describe a color to you using words alone.

 

        Just what exactly does Golden Oak,  Medium Walnut, or kinda reddish, but not too dark mean?

A name is whatever someone wants to call it.

 

This really got driven home to me when I used two different companies’ Golden Oak stains and they came out differently. I made a sample board using the same color stain by Minwax and Sherwin Williams (who owns Minwax) on different woods.  Some I expected, some I didn’t.  Ash and red oak look a lot alike in the raw, but using the same stain, ash gets yellow and red oak gets brown. 

“Yes, ma’am, which Golden Oak did you want?” https://www.google.com/search?q=golden+oak+stain&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj1pLb2m-7TAhXkzIMKHahOAQ4Q_AUICigB&biw=1366&bih=631#imgrc=_

Top to bottom on my sample boards --  red oak, poplar walnut, ash, cherry, hard maple.   Notice some of the awful blotching with the Minwax stain

 

LEFT :  MINWAX GOLDEN OAK                                      RIGHT: SHERWIN-WILLIAMS GOLDEN OAK

 LEFT: FINISH ONLY               RIGHT: MINWAX GOLDEN OAK, PRECEDED BY MINWAX PRE-STAIN WOOD CONDITIONER (still blotching on poplar and hard maple!)

Don’t get me started on what I call the “beverage colors,”  espresso, java, coffee, café au lait, burgundy, merlot, etc.

 

The names can change

 

A second reinforcement of this principle was when my primary vendor of touch-up products re-labeled their line.   What was a mish-mash of color names became your choice of {light, medium, dark, extra dark} in a variety of wood tones {cherry, mahogany, maple, oak, pine, walnut} plus a few others.   Problem was, what used to be Dark Pine suddenly became Medium Walnut.   What used to be Medium Cherry was now Light Mahogany.   To confuse things more, there were a few add-ons such as Black Cherry, which for all the world looked like another vendor’s Newport Ebonized Cherry.  And vendor 1’s Dark Walnut was vendor 2’s Perfect Brown.  Vendors #3 , #4 and #5 had a completely different color naming.

 

This is finish, not paint

 

The final color is a combination of the wood’s properties, the stain and how you apply it and the top coat.   All three contribute to the final color.   And that’s before you add additional color with toners or glazes.  And the color will vary over time due to fading, ambering of the finish, and patination of the wood. 

A major hardwood vendor told me years ago, there were 35 different industry standard colors for red oak.   And of course, red oak is a family not an individual species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Quercus_species.   Cherry grown in Pennsylvania looks differently from cherry grown in Indiana or Virginia.  Of course the resulting color is going to be different.

 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

 

And so is color.  I read an article by a professor at an art school.   He showed the same colors to his students and they had different opinions of what the colors were and how well they went together.   And these are art students, not some color-blind middle aged white men.   The fancy name for this is “observer metamerism” the same color can look different to different people.    Ambient light also can make a huge difference in the observed color.   The same finish (or paint) in incandescent, fluorescent, flash, LED, direct sunlight, and indirect sunlight can all make a difference.   So can reflected light if you put the item in front of a red, green blue, yellow, or white wall, even.

There are some standard colors, kinda

 

There are some basic earth pigments that are more or less standard, but even then there are some variants.  Not that you will ever find a stain labeled as such.  But they make up the basic cookbook of colors.   You may (if you are an oil-color artist) or may not recognize them – raw umber, burnt umber, raw sienna, burnt sienna, cordovan, yellow ochre, vandyke,  black, white.

 

Samples, not words.

 

L took a class in faux finishing painting a number of years ago.   The instructor worked for a noted decorative painting company here.   He came in one day and said, “We have a new record.   We’ve painted a room 27 times and the customer said it still wasn’t ‘Quite right.’”   Fortunately, they were time and materials not fixed price bid.  54 coats of paint on that wall and none suited that fussy customer.  I could only imagine it started out, "I''d like it be light green on an ivory base."  So when someone says they want a “dark cherry finish,” either run the other way or get them to sign off on a sample.

Edited May 16, 20178 yr by kmealy

1 hour ago, kmealy said:

So when someone says they want a “dark cherry finish,” either run the other way or get them to sign off on a sample.