Although other varnishes can work to a similar degree, Liquitex is usually considered to be the best option, especially when it comes to maintaining the brightness of neon colors. If you are just practising your neon artwork with your acrylic paints though, you can use almost any varnish product to see how its results turn out.
Acrylic Paint Glow in the Dark Tutorial
In this article, we will discuss the art of acrylic glow in the dark paint.
Thanks to Crisco Art for his help in creating this tutorial. Be sure to follow him on Instagram if you haven’t run into his designs already.
Materials needed for glow in the dark acrylic paint
- Canvas
- Brushes
- Medium transparent gel for volume
- Colorless phosphorescent gel
- Phosphorescent acrylics
- Normal acrylic paints
With any painting, you want to start with a background. Especially in acrylic painting, it is important to work in layers. In this example, the background is made of regular acrylic paints.
Think about your design. Which background works best? Will you use glow in the dark acrylic paint for the background or will it remain regularly painted? While painting your background, work from light to dark.
It’s crucial to remember you will be working with glow in the dark paint, eventually. Think about where you want to make sections come to life in the dark. You have the opportunity to give your work of art two lives. One in the daylight and one in the dark.
The daylight portion of the painting is primarily created with primary colors. You can begin to work the glow in the dark acrylic into the project as well. The moon on this canvas has been glossed over with glow in the dark paint, however, it shows up as white in the daylight.
The more you use glow in the dark paint, the more experienced you will become and the easier it will be to use. Our suggestion: Until you become more comfortable with how it is used, use sparingly.
Glow in the dark paint has the tendency to make regular acrylic coats lighter. As seen in this painting by some of the streaks in the sky. Use this to your advantage for the daylight version of your painting.
As you can see from the close-up view of this example, it’s not hard to differentiate which portions of the painting have been touched with glow in the dark paint.
Once you’ve finished the background (which in a lot of cases is the bulk of the glow in the dark usage), you can move onto the foreground. In this example, Crisco Art has created a cityscape.
Dabbing the work with a paper towel or cloth is an effective way to give it a splotchy look which, in turn, creates softer lines and more depth.
The foreground is enhanced by adding the silhouette of a boy in fine, crisp detail. Much finer than the rest of the painting.
By adding the boy’s shadow, Crisco Art gives a dimension of perspective as the white moon can be seen as a setting sun.
Then, at night, you can see the sun becomes the glow in the dark acrylic moon.
How To Make Neon Colors With Acrylic Paint!
The most popular way to make neon colors with acrylic paint at home is to take a suitable acrylic paint from your collection and add the relevant neon pigment powder to it. For example, a red acrylic paint will have a red neon pigment powder added to it and this method tends to help keep your initial costs as low as possible as you are already using the paints that you currently have in your collection.
If you are deadset on making your own neon colors using acrylic paints then a cheap set of vibrant color acrylics tends to drastically improve your results. This offers you the benefit of having the regular acrylic paints available without the neon properties for future artwork if required. If you are only picking up a set of vibrant acrylic paints to make neon colors though, just going with a set of cheap neon acrylic paints from the start will probably be the best option.
When it comes to actually mixing your neon pigment powder with your acrylic paints you simply take a small amount of your base acrylic paint and add a small amount of the correct colored powder to it. Due to the pigmentation of the acrylic paint, you usually do need a surprisingly high amount of the neon pigment powder for the neon and glow in the dark properties to take hold though.
Even though you will be adding a large amount of the pigment, we would always recommend that you add it to your paints in stages of small amounts of pigment. Although this does take time to build up the color, it offers you the best control over the final color by working your way upto what you are working towards in stages allowing you to taper off the amount of pigment you add each time if needed.
It is considerably easier to add additional neon pigment to your acrylic paint to enhance the effect than it is to add more acrylic paint or gesso to decrease it. Although it may seem like adding small amounts of pigment in stages and then mixing it with your acrylic paints will take too long, if you do overdo it then counterbalancing your paints will take considerably longer.
Unlike some other pigment options on the market, a decent neon pigment powder should not cause any issues with your paints attaching to your canvas or paper during application or when drying either. There are a number of low quality neon pigment powders on the market that have a number of issues with them so always try to go with a good set of cheap pigments like the ones we recommended above.
How To Make Neon Colors With Acrylic Gesso!
A decent, clear gesso acrylic can work wonders in a number of situations for anyone involved in acrylic painting and you are also able to use it to make your own glow in the dark, neon acrylic paints too. Although you are able to use a white gesso if you already have it in your collection to keep costs down, a clear gesso is always going to be the better option when it comes to neon colors.
The process is very similar to mixing your neon pigment powder to your acrylic paints with you adding small amounts of your pigment to your clear gesso in stages and mixing the two together each time. If you are using a clear gesso, you really don’t need that much pigment to get a nice solid neon color but if you are using a white gesso then you will need considerably more pigment with the end result usually being worse.
The consistency of your neon gesso based acrylic paint can depend on the type of neon pigment that you use to get the colors you want but the majority of the time, it tends to be an easier route to take then to add the pigment to an actual acrylic paint, especially if you use a clear gesso product. Depending on what you are going to be doing and the time you have available to make your neon colors, it is probably going to be a better option to just go with a set of cheap neon acrylic paints.
How To Make Neon Colors By Mixing Paint!
If you are using a a cheap set of vibrant color acrylics then you are usually able to mix the different colors of your paints together to make pretty much any color that you could ever want that will be close to neon. Although it will not glow in the dark unless you add a neon pigment powder to these paints, they are still probably the best option for making neon colors by actually mixing acrylic paints with each other.
If you are using regular acrylic paints then this is considerably more difficult as they simply don’t have the correct pigment set to make neon colors or to glow in the dark. Even if you mix a regular acrylic paint with a vibrant color, the regular acrylic paint tends to dominate the mixture and remove the vibrancy from it.
This is why so many people end up disappointed when they try to make their own neon colors with acrylic paints as they tend to only have regular acrylic paints in their collection. So many people fail to realize that the neon pigments are specialist pigments that are not commonly used in regular acrylic-based artwork and this is why it is usually better to buy an actual set of neon acrylic paints for your artwork.
