Hue must be joking...

[tomparryharry]

Hello Folks, I hope you're all doing well. 

 

some questions from the collective, as usual. I'm currently thinking about ceiling paint  in the shed. What's ideal, blue or white?  

 

many thanks,

Ian.

[Phatbob]

White.  Maximises the light in the shed and doesn't affect the spectrum of the reflected light.  A blue painted shed will affect colour rendition.  Models will always look their most realistic under a full spectrum white light IMHO.

 

[MarkSG]

If you're going to paint the walls and ceiling, then white, definitely. Otherwise, a natural neutral colour (eg, leave wood unpainted). You don't want anything which will create a colour cast over the layout.

 

Bear in mind that the sky looks blue when you look at it (well, some days, anyway), but it's not actually reflecting blue light on you! The sky is blue because of refraction, not reflection. A blue painted surface, though, will reflect blue light. Which isn't really what you want.

if you really want something that's designed for a model railway, then a Pendon style lightbox ceiling is ideal. But that might be a bit beyond the resources of the average modeller in a shed 😀

 

 

[Nearholmer]

Invisibly pale grey works very well as both a background colour for models, more typical than bright summer blue, and, much to my surprise, as a ceiling paint.

 

My daughter persuaded me, against my judgement, to paint a ceiling for her using a colour that I think was called Goose Down, a very pale grey with a very feint hint of blue. I was convinced it would be a disaster, and indeed it looked dire when first applied, like very wet concrete, but when it dried …….. very clever! It makes the ceiling sort of disappear, even more so than white.

[Metropolitan H]

For walls, I recommend a similar colour to Nearholmer - Farrow & Ball's No.2011 "Blackened", or a near equivalent from "Brewers" (other paint shops are available). However, for the ceilings I prefer modern Brilliant White - as suggested earlier. See the corners of my work in progress playroom.

 

 

 

The lighting is an LED fitting designed for bathroom use supplemented with a shaded Velux window (the only time the shade blind is raised is for the occasional vacuum cleaning of dead insect bodies).

 

Unfortunately, I don't have shares in Farrow and Ball - but I do find they have some very useful colours for scenic modelling applications.

 

Regards

Chris H

Edited May 22, 2023 by Metropolitan H

[The Johnster]

Another vote for very light grey-cast offwhite from me, but it depends on how you intend to light the layout as well as the ambient cast of the room (note how I avoided the somewhat emotion-charged sh*d word, clever, eh?).  Natural daylight is probably best so long as your local climate is similar to the putative one for the location/period of the layout (box ticked so far as you are concerned, Ian, Llantrisant isn't too far from Newport, and on more or less the same latitue), and the layout is orientated sympathetically.  My own layout room is magnolia, and I have no say in this because I live in a rented flat, but it's not too bad for my purposes, and while offwhite greycast would be my ideal choice, pretty much any offwhite will 'do'. 

 

You can then control the actual 'stage lighting' for the layout by whatever means you find suitable and you can afford.  Lightbox ceiling is perfect, so long as the cast of the light can be customised; real life does not consist of wall-to-wall bright summer cloudless skies, especially in South Wales, you may have noticed this...  I use led anglepoises, one about every four feet of layout, capable of three brightness settings and of cool white, warm white, or mixed colour casts.  Not perfect, in the way, but no shadows from the operating mechanism, or Johnster as it sometimes identifies as, and capable of at least suggesting different times of day and different weather conditions.  They also have the advantage of illuminating the viewed sides of trains and buildings, a soapbox of mine.  Overhead lighting, the default on many layouts seen in videos and at shows, is very wrong for UK-set layouts, as the sun is never directly overhead even at midsummer, and pretty low in winter even at midday.  This ain't the tropics, and I like watching my wheels and motion in action.

 

I mentioned sh*ds a while ago, but I think I got away with it...

[Kris]

White for light reflection. 

[chris p bacon]

Where we used to live there were quite a few large sheds (amazon etc) and to disguise them in the landscape they were painted in shades of blue that was darker towards the base, and lighter (near white) nearer the top.

It was quite effective, although quite a few thought that the dark blue should be at the top until you actually study the sky, and see just how light in colour it is. 

[Hroth]

A light whitish grey (apparently there are 50 shades...) ceiling should approximate the usual British sky.  It might also be a good idea to uplight the general room illumination so there's no direct illumination of the layout but is diffused instead, with lower level effect illumination of the layout itself.

 

As an aside regarding the sensitivity of the shedless to the word "shed" perhaps we could use a code, 66001 for example...

 

[Barclay]

This is surely a sub-shed of 86A ??

[Colin_McLeod]

I have white ceiling and yellow walls with sky blue, with white added, at backscene level.  I have used this colour scheme since my first layout room was my parent's loft back in 1971.  

 

This is different from the suggestions above, but it I like it and it feels homely to me.

 

Lighting is LED strip lighting and plenty of them.

 

[tomparryharry]

Many thanks one & all for your inputs and observations. I'm off this afternoon to have a serious look at Goose Down as a ceiling. Before that, however, there remains a lot of 'stuff' that needs moving to one side to allow Michelangelo to do his stuff.

 

I'm not Michelangelo, BTW. Some have said I look like a short Pavarotti.  Pavarotti? I'll pinch his biscuits... BAH! 

[CF MRC]

Nah… Go for broke, get those clouds in!

 

Tim

[33C]

Blackboard paint! Chalk it white for day, wipe off and draw the stars for night...

 

I'll get my cloak..

SLAM!

[tomparryharry]

On 24/05/2023 at 07:31, Barclay said:

This is surely a sub-shed of 86A ??

 

Well, I guess so. I can think of a dozen sheds within a 10 mile radius of my proposed location. However, I'm not sure I want to do a   shed location, or a station, for that matter. A locomotive 'on shed' although nice, is not uppermost in my mind right now. 

 

Of course, I could change my mind.... Mrs. Smith has just informed me that "you've got several gallons of paint 'in stock' that I have apparently forgotten about, so to quote the Pythons:- Ethel the Aardvark goes quantity surveying.  

[westerner]

I painted my backscene with grey and white primer with afew areas of very light blue painted before being sprayed with the primers. See my thread Blackney a glimpse of the Forest.

[OwenTheSignal]

3 walls of the railway room painted Albany Paints Bluebird (L). 1 wall, the long feature wall, painted Albany Cirrus (R). Left is for the stronger blues of autumn, when the sun is lower in the sky, and right is for the whiter blues of high sun and wispy cloud. Wanted a choice and clear background for photography

The actual colours are just slightly bluer and brighter than rendered here, photo taken into a corner with some shade.