Phosphorescent Paint Color Test
After my day/night landscape painting from yesterday, I decided to try a range of colors of the new phosphorescent pigments. The pure powder pigment mixes with clear gel medium to form a semi-clear paint that can be applied on top of an existing painting for a neat glow effect at night.
One of my concerns with using phosphorescent paint is the bright neon colors. I like the idea of being able to put a secret nighttime scene into a painting, but I don't want my paintings to be garish or too unnatural looking. Second, since the pigments are not totally transparent, I wanted to see how the paint would look against dark surfaces, and if it would be very noticeable during the day.
To test the way the pigments look on different colored backgrounds and in different lighting, I painted an 8"x10" canvas with black and white acrylic paint, forming a gradient from pure black on the left, to pure white on the right.
I then painted on my eight phosphorescent colors in horizontal stripes from top to bottom, so that each color would be shown against a gradient of light and dark.
1) Here's how it looks during the day:
As you can see, the powder is nearly invisible, but the appearance ranges a lot among colors. For all the colors, I mixed it fairly thick. From the top to the bottom, the colors are white, purple, blue, aqua, green, yellow, orange, red. All the colors are close to white in daylight except for the orange, so naturally, they show most at the dark end of the color gradient, and are nearly invisible towards the white end.
2) Here's how it looks the dark:
After charging up the paints with my easel light for a few minutes, I had a look at the canvas in the dark. According to the manufacturer, the green is the brightest, followed by the yellow and blue. Apparently, aqua will glow the longest, white the shortest. I'm not sure if I somehow contaminated the orange paint with the green, but I can't see much difference in color between the orange, yellow and green. The red does not glow very brightly but the color is interesting and could be great for some subtle effects. All the colors look a little darker at the black left edge of the painting, but overall have pretty consistent glow across background shades.
This type of paint presents some technical challenges. The main challenge is that because the pigment is nearly invisible in daylight, it is hard to apply. I painted in the stars in my night sky painting under normal daylight, because they did not require a lot of accuracy, but I think in future paintings I will get my paints mixed and charged up, then go paint in the dark so I can see what I'm doing.
Another challenge is that because of the properties of the light, additive color mixing doesn't work for phosphorescent paints - ie. blue and yellow together do not make green. I tested this a bit in the experimental painting above, by overlapping the areas between adjacent colors, and as you can see, the blending doesn't work like it would with normal paints. In the case of the red and orange stripes next to each other, the red stripe is nearly gone, because the much brighter orange (which looks green) overwhelmed it.
This paint is a bit too flashy for my usual style, and I wouldn't want to use it for most of my paintings, but because I always enjoy a new medium, I might use it as a way to get some new ideas and try things outside of my comfort zone, like a cityscape or abstract painting. In the past I have found that experimenting with new materials can be a good way to get out of a rut.