Thread: Black light

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For next year, I am planning on a room which is approximately 12' x 10' and then 12' in height. What do you experts suggest would be the required amount of blacklight to illuminate all 4 walls? I am planning on using flourescent blacklights ideally mounted on the ceiling. Can I get away with putting them on th e ceiling or will I need to put some lower too to make sure I get the bottoms of the walls?

Also, I plan to have the room well lit initially and the drawings on the walls will be visible, then the room will go dark, then go blacklight. When blacklit, I would like to all of drawings to be illuminated but only glow white and not show their original color. I have found this paint:

White Brush-on ClearNeon PaintClearneon Invisible Black light Paint

Does anyone have experience with it or another product they would recommend? It will be painted on top of latex paint on top of foam board.

Thanks

What color are the actual walls?

Thanks for the link on the paint. I need some for the ghost hands I got for my FCG.

The walls will likely be a very dark grey. Its a tomb scene and I'm trying to figure out if I should go Sand colored or Dark grey.

Ok so with a dark wall then I going to assume you just need the blacklights to make the pictures glow and not the walls.

If that is the case you only need the focal point highlight, which in this case is the pictures. So what I would do is use 4(four) 4' fluorescent fixtures with 2 bulbs in each fixtures. The hang them in the middle of the room and angle them at the wall towards the picture. Keep in mind when you hang it the height of the fixture from the ceiling to get the proper angle. I.E. 12' ceiling hang them maybe at 8' so they are not so high up.

I agree that 4' flourescent bulbs are the way to get good coverage (per dollar). I would experiment with painting the walls and painting 'under' the UV paint. Meaning if your wall is a darker color, try painting the area intended to be UV, with a white or even silver undercoat. It 'may' make a difference in how much the UV 'pops' out.

But you reference the 'invisible' paint. If you do not plan to switch on/off the UV light and use the invisible paint to create some sort of morph display - then there are lots of cheaper UV paints available. If you DO plan to switch back-n-forth, then standard flourescent bulb fixtures will be a pain. They have that startup flicker like most flourscent fixtures.

The expensive DJ-style UV bulbs often have very long warmup/cooldown times and so are also not good candidated for switching on/off. LEDs won't be bright enough. Last resort that I know of is to build physical shutters for the 4' bulbs that open/close.

I used two shop lites (48"ea) with 2 black lite bulbs for each in my 20 x 20 foot garage. There was quite a bit of lite from these and they start pretty quick. Last year made gray brick pattern walls, but with the black lite only the looked almost red to brown. I would try some samples with BL to see what works. My 0.02

My plan is to start with a lit room got to darkness then blacklight which makes glyphs glow. I am now worried about the startup flicker or fade in time on fluorescents based on previous responses.

What about CFL Blacklights - you know the corckscrew type? I have CFLs in place of incadescents in my house and they don't flicker on that I have noticed. Maybe I use a few CFL blacklights instead? Ideally, everything would be dark except the glyphs so no visible light from the bulb would be ideal would be ideal.

Automated mechanical louvres on the lights is probably more than I want to get into - feels like it would be one more level of complexity and one more thing to fail operationally. I need to test paint colors so I'll have to do a small scale prototype for all this anyway.

I am not sure how good the CFLs work because I have not seen them personally. I have though heard mixed results. You could also look into Minions LED UV floods. Those would give you an instant on and cheaper to use.

Dittos on using white paint before the actual color. Usually everyone will paint something black (or gray) and then put the colors right over it. If you start with black or gray, you should definitely paint white over it to get th fulle effect of the fluorescent paint. The white really makes it "pop."