Southern California Custom paint tinting

We are sought after to custom-mix unique and stunning house paint colors to satisfy your desires.

We custom-tint on your premises-the only place where you can actually assess a color’s effect (rather than guess and hope with paint chips in a store)-helping you create the luxury of a subtly nuanced and distinctive color palette that will truly define your home or business. You can hire us to apply the resulting paints, or bring in your own contractor to apply the colors we have tinted.

Clients often bring us in to correct disappointing one-dimensional store-bought colors-lifeless colors that can be either too bright and overbearing or not with the right amount of flavor to get that right zing. Our color expert—who has a BFA in Painting and 30 years’ experience—specializes in mixing what are called desaturated colors, colors that are sophisticated mixes of complementary hues.

Or bring us in on the ground floor of a project to create a richer, fuller pallet of colors that simply are not offered on store color decks. Paint stores do not offer such colors because they are time consuming to mix, and the cost would be prohibitive: Even if they had the patience and expertise to attempt to mix such colors, they would likely have to discard multiple attempts due to miscalculating the very precise amounts needed to get the delicate balance of complimentary hues just right. We find that nuancing the color can be such a delicate process that we often measure out a color component with an eye dropper.

Our process is far more flexible than the paint store model.

We are happy to say that we are one of the very few house painting companies to possess acclaimed hand-tinting expertise. Building on his bachelor of fine arts training at the prestigious Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Faux Finishing LA’s owner and color expert has been custom-tinting/hand-tinting paint for 30 years. We have a full set of permanent professional grade tints that we bring on location. We can also compound colors from artist-quality dry pigments not available in house paint stores—further liberating your choices far beyond those offered on manufactured color decks.

Below are just a few examples of our past work with custom tinting house paints.

We travel with an extensive palette of high quality tints.

In this first photo the paint was hand-tinted to achieve a shade of minty bluish green that could not be found in paint stores. The desaturated color was constructed from cool Phthalo Green and the far warmer Brown Oxide. The rich orange behind the counter was a specialty mix with a tint ratio higher than paints offered in stores. The tradeoff for the color’s intensity came in the form of incomplete coverage from the usual one or two coats. Four coats were needed to be brushed on for full coverage—a luxurious application that served the store owner’s strategy to have the area behind the counter radiate an alluring warmth, attracting customers and encouraging sales.

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In this second photo the deep plum color is another example of a unique, hand tinted color not available on conventional color decks. Although this mostly looks like a blueish plum it has crimson highlights because of the Toluidine Red used while building the color giving the effect that shifts from reddish to blueish hues in the changing light.

There is another important difference between store-bought and custom colors: We can build you colors that have the most intense chromatic impact that can be achieved from the currently known pigments. Paint stores do not even offer the brightest or most intense colors, because they might have such a high pigment-to-binder ratio that the paints will not lend themselves to rolling or spraying—as seen in this project, in which the eye-popping lemon yellow we custom-mixed had to be hand-brushed on the wall in five coats.

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Take a look at this gorgeous deep lipstick red. The business owner wanted us to add Ultramarine Blue to a rich Barium Red pigment, in order to make the color less suggestive of a blunt and one-dimensional “stop sign” red and instead radiate a suggestive subtle, cool blue glow under certain lighting conditions. Because such sophisticated color mixes of radically different pigments are complex and time consuming and require highly developed artistry, they are not offered in paint stores. For one thing, should paint store personnel attempt to create such subtle mixes (with pigments that are likely to have different tint strengths, no less), they could easily misjudge the appropriate amount of an oppositional hue, such as the deep blue used here, overshooting the mark and making the color too purple.

Often the subtleties in balancing hues are difficult to capture on film.

In this first photo the ceiling and both wall colors were created to the home owners specifications. This strong dark color has a deep earth red while having small amounts of both blues and greens so the red is not so abrasively overbearing. The tan is a rich yellow that has enough complimentary hues mixed in that the yellow does not get too overpowering on the large scale. The ceiling color was built with the same mixing regiment.

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In the second photo the darker accent green has subtle shades of an earthy reddish tone while the lighter color is a balanced blend of hues creating a more neutral khaki, not one that is too yellow, red or green.

This is just one job from the Faux Finishing LA catalog. We are a decorative painting company with thirty years of experience so this is just one example of the wide range of looks created in the last few decades. To find out more about this job or see photos from other styles, finishes or techniques feel free to call 323-457-9092 or email at info@FauxFinishing.LA