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Colour kleptomaniac: Kevin McCloud | The Fired Earth Elements of Colour palette cuts lots of ways. You can cut it horizontally and you can cut it vertically. It’s designed to work not just as a range, but it’s designed, very importantly, to work on the card. We had to design the card as we went along to make the whole thing work. You can fold it and refold it and use one page against another and it’s very important that you can work vertically down though it and horizontally and diagonally and so on.
And there are relationships through the palette. You can choose colours from the same row or from the same column and they will work together. That isn’t happenstance – it took a long time to get it right.
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A comprehensive quality: Fired Earth paint | The other thing is that I was very, very keen on is this idea that I’d come across in America a couple of years ago, of architectural colours. Colours which, if you were opening an art gallery, you would be really excited to paint your walls with.
Generally, although people really like colour and use it, we’re all of us a little timid about experimenting with it and we’ll us it in selected ways – in small rooms, like the loo, or on one wall. So it’s important that we find other more neutral colours to go with it.
So the first half of the palette is devoted to neutral colours I call architectural colours. Off-whites, creams, buffs, beiges. There’s a big neutrality there. It was enormous fun playing around with it because you could go more yellowy, more red, more pink, more green, and each pair of columns is a family group of pigments used to create these off-whites. Looking at the palette feels right, it has a comprehensive quality about it.
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Architectural colours: Glass Samphire from Fired Earth | A friend of mine is a colour consultant; he works for historic agencies and people like English Heritage. When people ask him what colour they should paint their sitting room, he says, ‘paint it whatever colour you want’.
That’s the premise for my view on historic colour. Ultimately what matters is not a particular period shade of mint green, or pea green – because with the ravages of time these colours tend to distort completely anyway – and, besides which, who cares? Unless you’re living in a Grade I-listed house that the public comes to visit, who cares?
What interests me much more is the way that paints are put together and the whole of the Fired Earth palette was assembled using traditional pigments. In other words, pigments which were available in the 18th, 19th or 17th century.
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Subtle and complex: Light Camboge from Fired Earth | The pigments include yellow ochre, red ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, burnt umber, ultra marine blue, vermilion red, viridian green, green verdita, blue verdita. A palette when you think of it of just reds, yellows, greens and browns. But they’re earth colours, so they tend to be mineral colours dug out of the ground for 10,000-20,000 years. They were the colours with which people decorated. By mixing them you can achieve decorating colours of subtlety and complexity.
The traditional paints tend to be much more complex, so there’s a sort of grey browniness about them, which makes them complex, interesting and subtle. They change with light in a way that modern colours don’t, which can look very synthetic. When I’ve bought paints that are coloured with modern tinting machines I often find myself mixing two or three together to get the colour I want because they’re too brash, too simple.
I think the thing about the historic colours is that they’re at the other extreme – they’re just mud and some of them are incredibly dowdy. Ever since I’ve worked with Fired Earth – right from the beginning when we did the English Palette – I wanted to try and make colours that were based on historic pigments, which might have appeared in history and were therefore appropriate for historic houses, but which at the same time were much clearer and less muddy and had more life to them.
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Flexible and characterful: Turkish Blue from Fired Earth | So for me it’s always been about trying to find the balance between the colours which look as if they’re made from earth, soil, on the one hand, and those colours which are entirely synthetic. Trying to find the middle ground, I suppose. Trying to find colours which have that kind of earthiness in terms of origin but which, nevertheless, are fresh and clean.
When you walk into a room, you don’t feel like you’re walking into some kind of 18th century set, or some grim period interior, but that you’re walking into a room that makes you feel good. It’s got to make you feel good and relaxed.
A word I often use when I talk about colour is supple. The idea that a colour can be reflexive. That you can walk into an environment and it can be, on the one hand appropriate, calm, traditional, soft and complex, and on the other hand, it can also accommodate you. You don’t have to make too much of an effort, you don’t have to feel that it’s too brash. Suppleness is a very important quality and I think the whole range has this sort of suppleness. I guess I’d describe it in one sentence as supple, architectural, flexible and characterful.
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Beauty rests on utility: Fired Earth Original Shaker kitchen | The thing about Shaker furniture and interiors is that they were painted using exactly those kinds of pigments, so it’s highly authentic. The pigments used to paint the Fired Earth Original Shaker range are those pigments that were available to early American settlers. They had a lot of earthy reds, earthy blues, using those traditional blue verditas and green verditas and browns and ochres.
I painted my new flat in Bass Wood, Marble – from the new range. Bass Wood – what a cool colour on woodwork. It’s a really kind of Shakery, French 18th century, it’s got a really nice period feel without it looking too muddy.
My whole house is decorated with colours from the range. The colours that make me really happy are the kind of azure blues, the soft warm blues. Not so much the greeny blues, but the kind of warmish ones. All the yellows – I’m a real yellow, sunshiny, ochre person. I love that. People laugh at me and say that’s a puffy shirt you’re wearing. I’m an enthusiast about colour. I don’t really care what other people think – it just cheers me up.
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Colour coordination: Cinnabar Red from Fired Earth | When I redecorated my own house, I started off with the paint colour and then had to go and find the furnishings and the curtains and it was a complete disaster. It made me realise you should start with the cushion and the fabric and then you should work backwards and finally choose your paint colour to go with all of that.
You have to remember when you put a paint colour on a wall it’s not like a cushion – the colour reflects on itself and it magnifies, the light reflects from one wall on to another so it deepens the colour. Also, because you’re dealing with such large areas, it has a bigger impact and so something that looks almost white on the palette will actually look more pink in the room.
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Soft, warm colours: Welkin Blue from Fired Earth | I’ve often said to people that if you really want to know what the colour looks like, paint the inside of a box, because it’s like building a model and you can almost build a model room and really quickly.
I did it recently with my daughter. She wanted a lilac room and wanted quite a synthetic colour, so we went to a shed and we bought these tins of lilac paint and, you know what, they were all horrible. We painted the cardboard boxes. I did three and then I mixed the colours and she hated all of them. Loved the colour cards, didn’t like the room because they felt too intense, too synthetic and in the end we used a Fired Earth colour.
For more information on Fired Earth’s range of stunning paints, visit www.firedearth.com |
