I got the glow in the dark pigments in near the end of last week and have been experimenting with them a bit. As I expected, they don’t glow nearly as strongly as the glowsticks did, which has unfortunately made photographing
them difficult. I plan to use a much higher pigment/binder ratio going forward, which will hopefully make them brighter, but for now there’s going to be a little bit of faith involved when I tell you they do visibly glow in a dark room, just not bright enough for my phone camera to pick it up most of the time.
I ordered a canvas today that will be the canvas for my final project. Until it gets here, I will be continuing to experiment with how to get the best glow out of the pigments. Based on my experiments this week, my best bet will be to paint the entire picture in acrylic (using pastel colors as much as possible in the areas I want to glow), letting it dry, and then going over it with several layers of the glow in the dark paint.
The hardest parts of this project will be to get the glow bright enough and clear enough to make it obvious what the shapes are, and getting the painting underneath to look right. I am at best a mediocre painter, which I didn’t quite think through when picking this project, so I also used this week to experiment with the colours of the under-painting. It was a difficult adjustment for me mentally to get used to the idea that in order to make it look like a night scene, literally everything is blue/green, even the things that re actually orange or brown. As a result I have some really weird greens in my practice paintings for this week, and I will probably still have some weird greens in the final painting, but hey, it’s a monster. It can be a weird shade of green if it wants to be.
Next up for me is to continue experimenting with higher pigment concentrations to get a clear glow from the paints, and as soon as I get the canvas in, getting the sketch and the basic shapes and colours painted in. Then all that will be left on the project itself would be lots of coats of glow paint, and cleaning up the painting details to the best of my ability.