Optional extension: exterior color

The course's method taken outside, briefly: find what is fixed, watch the light, build around the roof, and sample on the actual wall.

1. What is fixed outside

Inside, the fixed elements are the floor, the tile and the sofa you are keeping. Outside, the list is longer and most of it is not yours to change:

• The roof. Shingle, tile, metal or slate, it is often the largest colored surface on the house after the walls, and among the most expensive to change. Its color and its warmth relative to everything else are the first fact of the exterior. Section 4 is about it.
• Brick, stone and block. A chimney, a foundation, a wainscot, a whole facade. Masonry is rarely one color; it is a range, with mortar as a second color that can matter as much. Describe it the way Module 2 taught you: family, value, chroma, and warmth relative to the roof.
• Windows. Vinyl and aluminum frames come in a factory color, usually a white that leans one way or another, or a bronze or black. Painting them is a product question beyond this page; for color purposes, treat the frame color as fixed and compare every candidate trim against it.
• Doors and garage doors you are not replacing, gutters, downspouts, railings, the driveway and paths.
• The neighbors' houses and the street's pattern. A house is seen with the houses beside it. A street of pale bodies and dark roofs has a pattern; a street of mixed brick has another. You do not have to match it, but it helps to know it, because the house that ignores the pattern tends to be the one people notice, and whether you want that is a Preference worth deciding on purpose.
• The landscape. Lawn, trees, hedges, a desert yard, snow for four months. Green is a large surround outdoors and it can shift the colors beside it; the same Physical principle of simultaneous contrast from Module 3 applies at the scale of a whole wall. A body color that looks quietly warm against a gray chip rack can look pink against a lawn.

Walk around the house with the inventory open and write these down before you look at a single chip. If you have done Module 1, the habit is already there.

2. Light outside

Outdoor light is the inside problem multiplied. Test it In practice, boards in full sun usually look lighter and stronger than the same boards in shade, and a mid-tone chip that looked restful indoors can look washed-out or louder than you expected on a sunny wall at noon. In shade the same color often looks darker and cooler, because much of the light in shade comes from the blue sky rather than straight from the sun. The two faces of one house can look like two different colors for much of the day; how different, only your boards will show.

Physical principle Which faces get sun, and when, follows the sun's path across the sky (sun geometry). In the northern hemisphere a north face is in shade for much of the day; a south face is often lit for most of the day; east faces are bright in the morning and west faces in the late afternoon. In the southern hemisphere the north and south faces swap. The geometry is not the whole story: a tree, a neighbor's wall or an overhang can put a south face in shade all afternoon. That the light on a north face tends to look cooler and more even, and late-afternoon light warmer, is a Convention to check rather than a rule. Observe, and write it down.

Two conventions follow from the sun effect. Convention Some painters and designers suggest starting one or two steps darker or more muted than the chip you first liked, on the reasoning that sun and a large area tend to make a color look lighter and stronger. The direction fits the laboratory finding described in the glossary's area effect entry, but the course has found no source for the convention itself, and the amount varies from house to house. Treat it as an optional starting point: if you try it, paint the chip you liked and the darker one side by side and look. Sometimes the chip you first liked is the one that works. Convention Judge the house from the street, at the distance a visitor sees it, as well as from close up; at that distance a texture of brick or clapboard tends to average into one value, and small detail colors become hard to pick out.

The method is the one from Module 9, moved outdoors. Test it Brush at least two coats of each candidate on a large board (Benjamin Moore's sampling page says a larger swath is important; two feet across or more, if you can) and fix the boards to the actual wall, side by side with the trim, the brick and the roof edge in view. A board can be moved between the sunny and shady faces; a patch painted straight onto the siding, where you are allowed to, shows the color in place and works best over a light existing color. The practical minimum: look from the street once with sun on the boards and once in shade, and write a line or two in the light log. That is enough for many decisions. For a hard or expensive choice, add more: other times of day, an overcast spell, a second day, both faces. A sample looked at only in the sun leaves out half of what the house will do.

3. The three-part palette convention

Convention Most exterior schemes are described in three parts, and the convention is a good enough place to start:

• Body: the walls, the largest painted area, the dominant color in Module 6's terms. Usually the lowest in chroma of the three.
• Trim: fascia, corner boards, window and door casings, railings, porch posts. Often one color for all of it, at a clear value step from the body so that the edges of the house read from the street. Lighter than the body is the common choice; darker than the body, or close to it in value, are legitimate choices that many people find calmer, and the demonstration below shows trim close in value.
• Accent: the front door, sometimes shutters. By convention the usual place for a higher-chroma or very dark color, and often the cheapest thing on the house to repaint if you change your mind.

Three is not a law. A brick house may have no body color to choose, only trim and a door. A house with stone, shingle and clapboard already has three materials and may want a single paint color across all of its woodwork so that there are not six. The point of the convention is to make you decide which surface is dominant and which is the accent, rather than buying "a nice blue" without a job for it. The palette builder takes an exterior as a room: give the body, trim and door their roles there.

4. The roof: the anchor most people forget

Ask people what color their house is and they name the siding. Ask what color the roof is and they look up. Yet the roof is often a large part of what the street sees, it is rarely changing soon, and it has a warmth of its own: brown and red-brown shingles usually lean warm; gray, black and slate usually read cooler; many "weathered wood" and "driftwood" shingles are a mix that reads different ways next to different bodies. In Module 5's terms the roof is usually the anchor, whether or not you like it.

So the first comparison outdoors is roof against body candidate, by holding the sample board up to the roof edge, not roof against chip. A cool gray body under a warm brown roof can work and can also look like two houses stacked on each other; which it does depends on value and on whether anything bridges the two (a warm trim, a brick base). If the roof is being replaced soon, choose the roof first and treat every other decision as provisional until it is on.

5. Rules that may apply

Outside, the color of your house can be someone else's business, and finding that out comes before sampling, not after painting.

• Homeowners' associations and condominium boards often have an approved palette or an approval process, sometimes down to the door. Ask for the current document and the process before buying samples; a board that takes six weeks to answer changes your schedule.
• Historic districts and conservation areas may regulate exterior color, materials and even sheen, and may require a permit for repainting. Your city or county planning office can tell you whether you are in one.
• Rental agreements usually reserve exterior decisions to the owner entirely. If you rent a house, a front door or a planter is likely the limit, and even the door is worth asking about.
• Shared walls and party fences in a terrace or duplex may be jointly owned. Ask the neighbor; it is cheaper than a dispute.

Ask before sampling: some districts regulate painted patches on a facade, so check with the district before you paint one, and ask whether a board held against the wall is acceptable instead. Where the rules give you a palette, the method here still applies inside it: find the fixed elements, test the permitted candidates on the wall, and choose the one that works with your roof rather than the one that looks best on the list.

6. See it: three bodies on one roof See it

A simplified house, drawn on the page. The roof, the chimney, the brick foundation, the windows' glass and the ground stay identical in every option; only the body, the trim and the door change. The choices are deliberately different kinds of answer, not three shades of one. Look at how the roof's weight changes as the body goes darker, and where the edges of the house are easiest for you to read.

In words: with a light body, the roof is the darkest and heaviest thing and the house reads as a pale block under a dark lid; the dark door is the only other dark note, so it tends to draw the eye. With a mid body, the roof and body are closer in value, the house tends to read more as one object, and the light trim does most of the work of defining edges. With a dark body slightly darker than the roof and trim close to it in value, the edges nearly disappear in the drawing, the brick foundation and the cream door do the defining, and the roof stops being the darkest element. None of these is the correct one; each is a different decision about what the street should notice first.

7. Practice: two boards, sun and shade Practice

Time: 45 minutes, plus two short looks (one in sun, one in shade); more is optional. Materials: two sample boards (poster board, foam board or primed card, as large as you can manage, each painted in at least two coats of one candidate), painter's tape or clips, the light log, your phone for notes. Do the first look on a day with some sun.

1. Check the rules first. Confirm from your association, district or landlord that you may sample on the facade and, if there is an approved palette, that both candidates are on it. Write the answer and the date in the decision log.
2. Inventory the fixed elements. Roof, masonry, window frames, anything staying. Describe each by family, value, chroma and warmth relative to the roof, in the inventory. Note the street's pattern in one sentence.
3. Choose two candidates for the body for different reasons, as in Module 5: one that keeps the roof as the darkest element, one that does not, or one warm and one cool against the brick. Paint each on its own board, two coats, and let them dry fully.
4. Fix both boards to the sunniest face, side by side, next to a window frame and within sight of the roof edge and any brick. Walk to the street while the sun is on them. Note which board is lighter, which is stronger, which agrees with the roof, and what the frames do beside each.
5. Move both boards to the shadiest face (the same day is fine) and look again from the street. Those two looks, with a line or two written down, are the practical minimum. Optional, for a hard or expensive choice: look again at other times of day, on a second day, or in overcast weather, and log what changes.
6. Decide, provisionally. Record the brand, name, code, product and sheen of each candidate in the sample tracker with the observations, mark the preferred one provisional, and write down what would make it confirmed (usually: the trim candidate tested beside it, and the door).

The exterior conventions here are labelled as conventions because they are common practice, not measurements. Apart from the area-effect finding and Benjamin Moore's sampling page, both in the source library, no external source was gathered for this optional page.