Client Sneak Peek : Ombre Stairs

We had a wonderful weekend working on a client projects.  We met with a new client on Saturday morning for a consultation and then we had a blast turning my kitchen into a lab! After a trip to the paint store, we spent the afternoon mixing paints to come up with 19 jars of graduated tints for an ombre installation on the stairs of our wonderful yoga client. The entry is an intimidating stack of steps, so we sought out to give them the Powell Brower treatment!

The color mixing was a bit tricky, but with Bethany's biology background, and my art background we turned 3 quarts of color into 19 colors.  It was so much fun!

                                    (I didn't really dip my antique Chinese brush in the paint..)

We bought 3 quarts of color in a coral color palette and labeled them as dark, medium and light "control" color, in addition to a gallon of pure white we used for mixing.  Our client very recently had the stairs professionally painted with Benjamin Moore Floor and Patio paint.  We wanted to use the same paint so as to get the same durability, even though we were just doing the instep. We used Duron's Adhesion Primer, our best friend, to prep the steps.  That was the trick in getting these colors to really pop. Next we applied two coats of the BM Floor and Patio paint. I don't know if you've ever used this kind of paint, but it was very thin, very viscous and dried very quickly.  It's almost like a stain, but is has epoxy in it to ensure the paint really sticks (and stays stuck) to the floor!

From each of the control colors, we added the lighter control to it in tablespoon increments, documenting the recipes all along the way. If we had added white to the darkest "control" color to achieve the graduation of color, we would have lost saturation in each mix and the colors would become muddy.  So we added the next lightest control color to each new mix.

Our lab notebook with all of our dilutions.

There are 19 steps total and we did a new color or degradation for every two steps.  Since there is an odd number of steps, we used the lightest mix (pure white with a tablespoon of the lightest control color, a light pink) on the last step only.  To keep it all straight, we mixed our colors in mason jars and labeled them for each step. 

And on Sunday, we painted.

The before.

The after.

We took the last shot as we were finishing up Sunday evening.  The light wasn't great, but we'll show you better pics when we reveal the Yoga Studio Project next month!  We're exhausted from dangling from these concrete steps all day yesterday and doing some precarious yoga-esque poses to get the undersides of the lip of the tread.  But we've so thrilled with the outcome, the perfect touch of whimsy for some sad stairs, and hopefully a peek of what's to come once the students reach the top and enter the inner sanctum.  

Tell us what you think!  And what you got into this past weekend.

- Nancy

I just posted this on a Before and After Link Party over at:

If you are looking for help with your home, we'd love to work with you! Contact us for a listing of our services and prices. 

Nancy and Bethany