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The sky seems to be printing in grayscale lately. It’s all clouds, rain, fog, and puddles. I’m not seeing the spring greens and blues, so when I came across the “Let’s Colour” project the other day, the idea of people trying to do away with the depressing by using color really made me start craving color. If Let’s Colour or one of the other great designers and artists bringing color and light to dull spaces could change the sky here, I’d really appreciate it.

Let’s Colour Project

The Let’s Colour Project from the Dulux Valentine paint company is making over gray, depressing spaces in London, Paris, Rio, and Jodhpur with paint. If you wonder how much good a little paint can do in crumbling neighborhoods, you’ll stop the moment you see the pictures of the work they’ve been doing. Paint doesn’t just change the spaces, it changes how the complete experience of the space, making the dull and depressing into colorful and cheerful. Not bad for some humble paint.

The project’s currently got a Let’s Colour France competition going where you can enter to have a space in France repainted simply by uploading a photo to Facebook. Eiffel tower for sure. Or maybe the Mona Lisa.  That definitely needs new paint.

Scala Stairs

Color is just one element German artist Horst Gläsker uses to convey emotions with his “Scala” stairs, which combine color with words describing things you might experience in a relationship. Each of the 112 steps is painted with a color and the German words for actions and emotions like “seduce,” “panic,” or “love.”

This is definitely one of those things that make you want to profess your love from the top of a mountaintop, or at least the top of this lovely staircase.

Rainbow Church

The International Design Alliance is currently presenting an exhibition by Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka, Rainbow Church, which opened May 1. Inspired by the sunlight filtering through the stained glass in Chapelle du Rosaire, a chapel where French Henri Matisse painted late in his life, Yoshioka is attempting to create a space “where people can feel the light with all senses.”

Composed of 500 crystal prisms, the church throws rainbows across the space as light refracts through them, engulfing the viewer in light and the colors it naturally creates. Let’s hope the sun cooperates.