Twenty years ago I used a clear matt sealer to seal my rock mountain after staining it with Woodland Scenics color pigments and applying scenic flocking. Over the years the scenery has faded under my fluorescent lighting. It has taken me 20 years to come close to finishing the scenery on my layout. The scenery has developed lighter shades of color from fading. I started redoing the stain on the rocks and flocking, fortunately I only sealed one small portion. Because of the sealer the Plaster of Paris rock castings won’t accept new stain. The new flocking and shrubbery really helped.
While the sealer did it’s job well by protecting the castings from nicks and dings it doesn’t match the newer non faded rocks. The areas with out the sealer came back to life with new stain and I easily took care of small dings over the years.
In case you did not know this, real rocks and stuff are outside in the sunlight and the fade all of the time. Rocks facing south will look different than rocks factin north. Utility poles be gray and weathered facing north (into the wind and the ice) but more pristine on the south side.
LIONS do not worry about the perfections of the colors. Even roling stock, may come out of the shops just perfect, but in a fe years the paint will be faded and will not match anybody’s color chips.
If you want to recolor a rock, and it will not take your paint because of a sealer, just put a light dusting of new plaster over the top of it, and that should give you a new base to work with.
Fortunately, the LION models SUBWAYS, and so dirty tunnels are jus plain old dirty tunnels, and need not much more decoration.
My deep green grass had become a light greenish yellow after 25 years. My layout is in our garage and before I started to build I hung five Hi Output two lamp 8’ Fluorescent lamp strips, I wanted to be able to see what I was building. The lighting is great but over time it has taken it’s toll on my scenery.
It wasn’t quite so noticeable until I remodeled the module next to it with new flocking and rocks. I’m one who likes deep greens and vivid colors so I’m in the process of over coating my scenery to restore the colors.
I still have quite a bit of unfinished scenery in hard to get to places on my layout and this got me going again. I set a goal to finish the unfinished areas this summer, there is about 15 square feet total to be finished.
The light green grass between the tracks and the road in the lower right corner shows the fading from the Fluorescent lighting, it was a deep green 25 years ago.<
Thanks for your post with observations. When I first started in MRR 10 years ago, I had flourescent lighting over head…it was in place already. I was warned to beware the UV problem associated with floursecent lighting, and your image confirms it.
I have since gone on to use 35 watt GU-10 style wherever possible…pots on tracks. They produce UV as well, but it is apparently better controlled in the halogens. Next to a window, of course, all bets are off.
If you were to mask the area around faded ground foam, you could possibly touch up the colour with craft paints blended to the correct shade and sprayed either with a sprayer or an air gun. Mind you, damage done to colours on ground foam is probably going to be deep-seated in the rubber itself, and the ground foam may be largely fragile dust if you touch it.
I’ve also had terrible problem with WS Realistic Water and Water effects. Today I was looking at my three small ponds and the WS has already started to go down hill and now I’m wondering if the Fluorescent lighting causes it to fail too. I poured the ponds about 10 months ago and they’ve already started to turn to crud.
I switched to clear Epoxy for water two years ago but because the WS crud doesn’t look as bad in my creeks I used it for my shallow ponds. The WS
I buy the Fluorescent tubes that have the UV shield, I had problems with the add-on tubes in the fixtures I’m using.
Glad to hear it’s not me using WS Realistic Water. It turned in to what looked like old floor wax buildup and dropped in volume. I poured ¾” in a small plastic box to make a swimming pool, less then two years later the pool was a dirty brown mess a little less than ¼” deep. Thinking it was a bad batch I did a second pool from a new bottle of Realistic Water and it went bad too. I made a new pool using Magic Water and it looks as clear today as it did three years ago.
