Paint for walls!

Discussion
1

Hi all bikeshed questions:

  1. Does anybody use the functional paint effectively in the space? By functional I mean blackboard, white board, magnetic,…

  2. Do any of you take time to paint artistically the walls or ceiling? does it feel more welcoming and worth the effort?

Or is it better to leave it all plain white?

2

  1. we don’t but it’s a nice idea

  2. at Leigh Hackspace we painted all the ugly boring white blockwork in multicoloured paints, donated by members, so it looks like huge LEGO bricks. We encouraged all members to paint a few blocks, so the job was distributed. And because the intention was a multicoloured wall, there was no necessity to get a load of any one colour, we could just use what we had available.

3

Paint no, but we got ahold of a roll of whiteboard wallpaper, which is pretty useful… Otherwise our breezeblock walls are all white…

4

Just spoke to an interior designer for big multinationals. Mentioned that the whiteboard paint was a good idea and cheap but what eventually happened was that the colour was at some point never removed so would start to look like a shade of grey. At that point it was worth just painting over cause it is cheap.

Then told me about magnetic glass boards which are much easier to clean. But expensive.

Re: decoration. Sounds like a great idea. Would be cool to do with one Lego brick per member.

5

A local artist prepared a piece using magnetic paint and said it wasn’t
massively effective and took many layers yo be even vaguely useful.

Ian

6

My magnetic paint wall (at home) has 4 layers on it. Rare earth magnets will hold 4 ish sheets of paper to it and pull off easily, anything less powerful won’t hold anything other than itself to the area - for example our magnetic letters will only hold themselves up.

TL;DR Magnetic paint is useful but needs several layers and isn’t super strong.

Tamarisk Kay

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7

That’s what my artist friend was trying to do, stick magnetic letters on to his painting.

It just about worked… :slight_smile:

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8

The new Leeds Hackspace was painted all white because a few members demanded it. Those of us who lobbied for some colour decided on placing LED strips around the space so that we can change the colour depending on need/wants. For instance, at this time of year adding more warm red lights lowers the heating bills because it feels warmer (even if it isn’t physically). So painting everything white ended up just giving us a bigger canvas for more colours that can be varied depending on who’s in.

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