White Balance issues with my photographs

I have been trying to improve my photography skills when building my models, mostly because I am writing more articles for publication and I need clean, well-lit shots. To that end, I built a simple photo booth of sorts made from three pieces of inexpensive white foamboard taped together into a bottom/side/back arrangement. This provides plain white background, though the joints are sometimes visible. 

To keep it clean, especially when I am painting or weathering my models (which makes a permanent mess sometimes) I set a piece of white posterboard on the bottom piece of foamboard. I have several pieces of posterboard that I rotate, with one dedicated for oil paint washes. When they get grungy, I ditch them and buy a new one. This keeps my background prestine.

However, I have recently struggled with lighting. I need lots of clean, white light. When my regular desk light broke I replaced it with a color-adjustable LED desk lamp. This worked okay, but I couldn't always confirm that the light color was set at 3500k. It had no marked settings, and if I unplugged it then they reset. Also, I bought an inexpensive LED handheld spotlight to augment my desk lamp and I couldn't always guarantee that I had it set at 3500k either. Sometimes my pictures would come out yellowish or pinkish. Not good.

For shots of my layout, which rely on my ceiling's 3500k bulbs and the small handheld spotlight, they also came out yellow.

Even though software can fix this, such as the free online BeFunky photo editor that I use a lot for adjusting the light setting on my scanned slides, I wanted to correct the problem from the start.

So, I bought new inexpensive spotlights and special 3500k bulbs and set them up over my workbench. Now, everything was guaranteed to be 3500k.  And yet the pictures turned more yellow than ever. Grr. I knew it was a white balancing issue but didn't know how to fix it. 

Finally, I read my camera's manual and found the white balance adjustment setting. Then, I set about taking a series of identical pictures of a model (my son's police car which was on my bench for repair) using all the different light setting to see what I liked best. Here are the results.

Auto select:

Sunny (outdoor):

Cloudy (outdoor):

Tungsten:

Fluorescent:

Fluorescent H:

I like the Tungsten setting best, followed by the Fluorescent (which is just leaning slightly into yellow). Everything else is much too yellow. 

I know this is basic level photography stuff but for some reason it only hit me now. At least I figured it out and can take better pictures.