Here is a bit about our color consultant
Every now and then, people ask me how I became a color consultant and whether there’s a special school or training for it. Actually, unless you count my two accredited painting and decorating apprenticeships, where I learned the fundamentals of color theory and technique, there is no dedicated color consultant schooling in my past. (You might be curious as to why I underwent two house painting apprenticeships; you can find that intriguing story here.)
My true expertise with color comes from nearly 50 years of working with it. In the early days of my career as a house painter, I had a chance to apply endless number of gallons of liquid color on a great variety of painting projects. Mind you, many of those gallons were filled with color I had to personally mix from scratch. Nowadays, the art of paint color tinting is somewhat rare, but there was a time when you couldn’t call yourself a professional house painter unless you could take a plain paint base and, using a universal coloring kit, turn it into precisely the color you needed.
Our Consultant, Yefim
Yefim's universal coloring kit
As my career progressed, already as a painting contractor, I had the opportunity of providing color assistance to hundreds our painting clients. As a result, my credentials with color come from hands-on experience and from being able to literally step back from a freshly painted project and see whether a color combination worked or did not. However, I didn’t truly embrace the role of a professional consultant until a friend of a friend offered to pay me to select a color scheme for their ongoing home painting project.
I think that my paint color matching experience has made me exceptionally attuned to even the smallest color discrepancies. What’s particularly helpful is that when I look at a color, I know precisely which colorants are needed to recreate it in paint. This ability comes in handy because, if a color isn’t quite right, I know precisely how to adjust it to get it back on track.
Just the other day, while my wife and I were taking our usual route to the park, we were going by a freshly painted building. A paint crew had been diligently working on it for the past few weeks and had just removed the scaffolding. My wife mentioned to me that she wasn’t pleased with how it turned out and felt that the house looked better before the paint job.
In this particular project, a simple two-color scheme had been used, but they missed with the red trim color. I could discern their intention: they were aiming to harmonize the trim with the prominent brick staircase color at the building front entry. The trim color would have succeeded if it had been just a shade darker and if the red had been toned down slightly. Unfortunately, it missed the mark, and now the trim stands out like a sore thumb.
Back when I first arrived in San Francisco from a small city in Ukraine in the late ’70s, I was utterly astounded and captivated by the sheer volume and diversity of colors used in San Francisco’s architecture. As a young house painter, I instantly knew that this was what I wanted to do. Now, many years later, there’s hardly a neighborhood in San Francisco that doesn’t boast at least a few homes I’ve contributed to making more colorful. With any luck, there will be many more to come!
– Yefim Skomorovsky
