I was going to add a question on lighting to the thread on working areas as it's often overlooked. In many ways working in an enclosed room is to be preferred; having a north-facing window or skylight is all well and good if you're a professional artist and you can paint during the day, but the majority of our work tends to be done in the evening. And quite frankly I think northlight is overrated, it varies constantly and in the UK and Ireland it's just not bright enough most of the time.
The good thing about not having windows is your lighting is going to be easy to keep consistent, meaning you don't have to resort to using blackout drapes on the weekends so the lighting is the same as during weeknights. I tried those blue bulbs for a good few months and then switched back to regular bulbs, I thought the light was far too blue and they run very hot as well. You can buy full-spectrum lamps but price tends to be pretty steep, however if you can swing it their CRI (colour rendering index) is excellent and the ones advertised in Military Modelling on a regular basis have a polarising filter which makes them even better. The light they put out takes a bit of getting used to but it's worth it apparently.
I use a mix of incandescent and fluorescent lighting myself, if you're going to use fluorescent strip lights look for cool tubes, at least 5500K if you can find this information out. Philips Colortone 50 and GE Chroma 50 are good ones, with CRIs in the low 90s. If you decide to work in incandescent light only I would paint one wall of the room a light blue (the ceiling and the other walls white) this helps to counteract the yellow/orange bias in the light.
Einion
