I've continued with construction of the 2nd level benchwork. It ground to a hault when my local lumber yard quit carrying 1X3X16 lumber. I'm now trying to get them to special order me some. If not, I'll have to head to the local Big Box store and get some "not so good" 1X3X8. Until then, the upper deck is on hold.
In the mean time, I decided to start working on backdrop and testing lighting.
For the backdrop, I'm using 1' X 78' strips of vinyl flooring with the back side showing. It's then painted a "sky" blue. Once it's all up, I'll come back and feather in some white to simulate the haze in the sky.
I've also hung up some test lights just to see how things look. Right now, I've got two fluorescent strips and a CFL bulb with different color temps in place. I've got my local electrical store ordering me a 10' strip of commercial grade, high output, LED rope lighting matched to the color temp of my room track lighting. I'm hoping it will work as it would be an easy install. I'll post more when it comes in next week or so.
So far, the CFL that's been in experiment role is a GE Helican 26 watt warm white.
I started with two florescent strip lights in a daylight 6500K temp. These made for some bright, vivid scenes but had a blue hue to them. I decided to throw in the warmer CFL to see what it would do and loved the results. The florescent strips give good, bright lighting while the warm white CFL warms the scene. If the rope light does not work out, then I'll do the tube florescent-CFL combo or get some full spectrum CFLs and pair them with a warm white every 24".
