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Believe it or not, the color blue we painted
this room is even called "Planetarium Blue" (the bathroom is "Cosmic Berry,"
btw).
I wanted to do even more than this, of course, but there are literally hundreds of glow-in-the-dark stars and other celestial objects all around the walls. There wasn't time to build the additional props I was thinking (e.g., spaceship control panel on the pool table). About as elaborate as I got was to put a strobe light under a piece of blue slag glass and surround it with black cloth to concentrate the beam to just the glass. |
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Katie as Smurfette in the Planetarium. Note the mobile of planets handing from the chandelier. They stand out more in this picture than the one above. We had a couple pairs of chromadepth 3D glasses to look at the planets with. I don't know how many guests actually tried that. My goal has been to do a whole room with chromadepth effects, but I haven't found theme appropriate to it yet. |
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With a couple blacklights overhead, the
short "hallway" between the back bedrooms and the bathroom makes a nice
little room. This doesn't leave a lot of room for props, but it's
ideal for wall effects.
Since we had a sci-fi theme going this year (e.g., flying saucer, alien costumes, mad scientist lab, planetarium), I wanted to create circuit patterns like this. |
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It's not too impressive in plain white light, but it's just posterboard and ticky tack. While the materials were cheap enough, it turned out to be really labor-intensive to put it all up one strip at a time, especially since the ticky tack wasn't very reliable (even for the stars in the "planetarium"). We had so many other projects going that we eventually abandoned it, and I was left with loads of strips I had put Leiann to the trouble of cutting. Maybe we'll find a use for those next year. |
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I had fun with the highlighters again this year. As you can see, there's nothing especially shocking about the guy under white light... |
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...but the accents look great under blacklights. |
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I also realized that there were fluorescent crayons in every box with more than a dozen colors. |
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They just right out at you under a blacklight. Now I know where to go if I run out of paint. |
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Some things blacklit unexpectedly. Since we built a blacklight bank in 2009 and another in 2010, I was able to set them up and try out whole rooms. |
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For example, the weedwhacker twine jumped out immediately. Lots of whites around the room fluoresced as well: diapers, garbage bags. |
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Some color changes were really unexpected. |
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It isn't obvious at this resolution, but
the wood grain in the guitars almost disappeared.
The pick on the left (top of neck) lit up because it was made with glow-in-the-dark plastic. The trigger on the little Dyson hand-held (which is mostly behind the green guitar) lit up as well. |
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This black guitar changed as well... |
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...making it look almost red or green, like some kind of color-blind version. |
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