"Out of This World" Black and White (& Glow!) Space Painting

If there is one thing I love, it is nifty paint effects.

Recently, I've began adding glow in the dark accents to my paintings - particularly any paintings hanging in nurseries or given to families with small children, and ESPECIALLY paintings involving space. Kids and adults alike are AMAZED when they see the painting glow after the lights go out at night!

This instructable will walk you through the process I used to create my latest glow-in-the-dark piece, a simple black and white space scene...with a special, and simple, glow-in-the-dark effect added.

For this painting, you'll need a few things.

Mainly, you will need:

A pencil for sketching (not pictured)

An eraser for sketching (not pictured)

Pretty Art Paper (Pictured!)

At Least 1 Color of Acrylic Paint (I just used black acrylic, not pictured)

Glow-In-The-Dark Acrylic Paint (Pictured!)

Paint Brushes of Preference (not pictured)

Black Light (Optional; Not Pictured; Makes It Fluorescent like the Title Picture!)

The wonderful thing about this painting is it's simplicity, so don't feel like you have to have the best supplies. $1 paint and almost any painting surface will do as long as it is heavy enough to not tear up under the paint if you water it down.

Take your pretty paper, your trusty pencil, and your best friend, the eraser and sketch out your scene!

I used a model rocket I had lying around to model for my rocket, but you can draw any style you please!

I created depth in this painting by adding different space-y things. Planets here, moons there. Asteroids, Galaxies, Etc. Adding them all over and overlapping them occasionally helps create a lot of the look once we start painting.

I also added a bright starlike sun in the corner, for the rocket to blast away from. This helps give us a lighting shading point to reference when we're painting!

You can pepper in these details wherever you like.

With a DRY paint brush, block in all non-sketched areas of the painting with acrylic paint. I used black, but any space-y color can work. I recommend making all negative areas in this painting a single, solid, dark color.

This picture was taken partially through adding the blocks of color to the background - I started with a 1" brush and switched to a smaller detailing brush to get the edges around the rocket, planets, moons, etc, so I could have clean crisp edges.

Now, with a wet brush use the same color paint to carefully shade all of the individual space-pieces.

If you had a sun in your picture, this makes it easy as you have a great reference point of where the lighting is coming from.

I let the details dry and came back and hour later to add a few more. This helped keep each layer of paint from blending in together and allowed an incredible level of depth and highlighting to be accomplished for only using one color.

Using a DRY brush, go over your painting and put glow in the dark paint over the brightest areas, and on any small space features you want to highlight.

This is my favorite step, and I like to do it in bursts, just like the first step. An hour later, you might find a new planet you want to make glow!

The first picture shows the painting in the light with the glow in the dark paint on top - it is practically invisible, but not quite, in average room lighting.

The second picture shows it glowing in complete darkness, but cameras never seem to capture the full glory of glow-in-the-dark creations. It does glow much brighter in person!

The third picture shows the painting under black light! This reveals all of the details of the painting, including the shading, and the more subtle space objects such as the asteroids floating far beyond the rocket.

As the painting itself is very dark, you can add some "surprise" aspects that area only reveal themselves when the lights go out. For this painting, the bottom galaxy becomes MUCH bugger, and you can see the flames jetting from the rocket...but only when the lights go out.

Are you ready to make your own glowing space creation?

Happy Painting!