Taking a lunch break and running through the many new blog posts waiting for me in my email box, I was reading Common Ground~ Debra’s dilemma in trying to find the “just right shade of taupe.”
& totally laughing at her picture!
I was thinking to myself how it may have helped her to have a paint palette book, and decided to send her an email with this bit of info.
Then I wondered– “Do you guys know about this?”
I couldn’t be without my many fan decks to help choose colors –who’s got the time to stand forever in a paint store trying to figure it out? Usually in “bad” lighting too. But when I’m really struggling, I can’t live without my paint palette book! To my knowledge, only Behr paints produces such a book. 
Mine is old, and very worn–I’ve been trying to get an updated book forEVer–with no luck. How I would cry to lose it. Any place selling Behr paint will have a paint pallet book behind their counter and let you use it–just ask! Plus, it will also be newer, larger, and more comprehensive!
It divides and breaks down the varying colors by -Tint, Shade, and Tone- to find the one just right for your project! And it includes those difficult Whites!
These are just a few example pages from the Paint Pallet book. The right margin of each page shows the tinted whites at each level.
~There’s also a book I found really FUN, helpful, and interesting by House Beautiful that you might like to check out!
It shows the gamut of paint companies’ colors in decorated room themes from “sunny days,” to “rooms men love.” And it gives you the paint info, so if you like it, you know what to get. No trying to find a color match!
I found my copy in a Half Price Book store a while back for $3!
And just for fun, a quiz!
What’s Your Color Personality?
Catherine
Happy painting!
I can’t remember how I found your blog but I’ve been following it for a year or so. Your creativity and vision are amazing to me. I recently blogged about painting dilemmas at http://handicraftysisters.blogspot.com/2012/02/to-paint-or-not-to-paint.html.
Love your blog! I find many of my clients have trouble with picking colors. Usually the color is too dark or intense ( especially true with yellows, pinks, and blues). Anne-Marie at 10 Rooms has several great tutorials on color that I think anyone would find helpful. I wish could have had her for an instructor in college. Color theory would have been much better explained.
Your palette book is a great idea. My way of choosing color for a room involves a pile of store paint chips taped to the wall. Over the course of a few days, I pull off the colors that are wrong … eventually leaving two or three possibilities to choose from. Using this method, I have chosen everything from pale yellow or green, to peach, to faded denim blue (a hard one) to eggplant purple for our daughter’s room years ago.