Why Classic Shades?

Have you ever tried naming a business? The conventional wisdom is that the business’s name should have something to do with what that business does or with its product.

What do “shades” have to do with painting? This question is very often implied, if not actually asked. Indeed in the past 35 years, I have gotten so many inquiries about window shades that I have often thought of starting a new business line, something like Classic Shades and Curtains. In fact, this is how I first learned this other definition of the word “shades.” I was learning a lot of new English words in those days.

To dispel any possible remaining confusion with the name, let me define a few terms about color. I think a lot of people know that thousands of colors can be produced by intermixing of the three primary colors – Red, Yellow and Blue. However it is a less well known fact that the only way to produce all paint colors that we see in nature, and on the multitude of painted buildings, is to throw some white and/or black into the mix (yes, pun was intended).

For example, we can mix some red and yellow paint together and get orange colored paint, but we would have to add some white to that paint mixture in order to get a light orange, and yet even more white will need to be added to get a warm-white colored paint. Of course, unless we want to end up with a barrel of this paint, we would start with white paint and add a little bit of orange (red and yellow) to it. To create a brown color, we would start with black paint and add some orange to it.

The process of adding white to the paint, in order to lighten it, is called tinting. Adding black to paint, in order to darken it, is called shading. Many beautiful and truly classic house painting color schemes are created with these shades of color.

Hence the company name.

Yefim Skomorovsky
Classic Shades Painting