It’s midday, midweek and midwinter at the Home Decor Group store's mixing station.

Not the busy season for paint sales but the station is lined with customers who have color on their minds.

A contractor doing repair work holds a downspout end in one hand and an angled piece of trim in the other, looking to match colors.

To his right, a woman wants a particular blue and, next to her, a man points to the shade he wants on a color chart.

Paint cans shake in the shaking machine and tinting machines ready to swirl.

Color is king because it reflects personality, sets a tone and, in a tough economy, offers value when dollars are short for people desirous of change, Home Decor paint guys said later.

Gallon prices range from $15 to $65, and a single gallon covers 400 square feet, said Bob Jepsky, one of the store's owners. At 50, he has been talking paint to customers since he was about 22.

“One coat of paint can make a huge difference,” he said.

Color has been king for a while but even so the trend has moved toward bolder colors including deep reds, said Jonathan Tapper, 32, a paint sales and marketing employee for more than 10 years.

One customer brought Tapper a bottle of chili pepper sauce wanting that color paint, he said.

Others have brought in vegetables, squash or gourds, and asked for paint in those colors.

Some people want fluorescent greens or oranges, Jepsky said.

Whatever the color, if the employees can see it they can make it.

Customers choose colors to accent, to coordinate with furniture, to match a time period, to establish a mood and reflect personality.

Gone are the days when all customers grabbed eight gallons of white and were off to the races.

Jepsky said that in his grandfather’s day a painting contractor would arrive at a home with a bag of lead and some solvents and offer to paint the house white, gray or brown.

Just a generation ago paint colors were defined by numbers not words like "million dollar red."

A big change on the paint frontier has been the advances in selection tools.

Customers can take home large paint chips and eyeball the result. They can buy pint-size samples and apply it to walls to see how the color and finish looks.

Once people relax and recognize that paint is forgiving — that any color can be changed — they tend to have fun with it, Tapper said.

Another popular paint quality these days is texture — paints that produce a look such as river rock or suede.

For longtime painting contractor David Paradise, whose work is primarily in Swampscott and Marblehead, a big change in the paint world has been the movement away from oil-based and toward water-based paint.

That’s due to environmental concerns — latex is more environmentally friendly — and because water-based paint has less of an odor and is less expensive than oil-based paint, said Paradise, a painter for about 33 years.

When it comes to color, homeowners tend to mix and match more these days, running a color from a hallway to a different-colored room, he said.

Reds and goldish-yellows are popular, he said.

According to Home Decor, a slightly larger percentage of their Swampscott customers employ contractors for painting as opposed to doing the work themselves, Tapper said.

In either case it's typical for a homeowner to consult on paint color.

This is especially true of people who want historically accurate paint colors for historical homes.

Paint research on the original look of many historical homes has revealed vividly colored exteriors and boldly colored interiors.

Utlimately, color has a firm hold on the imagination.

People recognize the ability of color to affect mood and get the kind of effect they want.

"Color is king," Jepsky said.