Seymour Lights Blog: Playing Around with Colorine

I am still considering switching my display to all LED lights for next season. However, I like to be prepared.

Since the stores are completely bare of lights this season and there will be no half price deals to be had, I am looking at ways to maintain lights and make ones I have on hand work where I will be needing them. Next season I plan to replace the standard light strings along the roofline of the house with icicle lights. I have not had any luck finding colored icicle (other than multi) lights around, so I am going to have to make my own. I was trying to avoid changing out bulbs with other strings, but it looks as though I may end up having to do just that.

I found a product made by Rosco (the leading supplier of theatrical lighting supplies) called Colorine. It's a product you can use to dip lights (up to 25 watts) into to change the color. The product itself is great, dries fast, super durable. The problem is I am not finding the colors to be a good match for factory mini light colors.

The examples you see are using 7607 Emerald Green, 7604 Moonlight Blue, 7602 Ruby Red and 7615 Canary Yellow. (The green and blue just won't work. I have ordered a pint of Cardinal Red and will see if that's a closer match to factory red mini light paint) You can match up the Colorine colors with the Rosco color chart here.

The only one that turned out well, is the yellow. It's a near perfect match to factory yellow mini lights, if not a slightly nicer hue. This will work.

I will show the other colors below. In each case the lights I dipped with the colorine are on the left and the factory mini lights are on the right. As you can see, just not good matches. I am especially disappointed with blue as those are the ones always needing recolored.