How to Make Colors Glow in a Painting (Without Neon Paint)

People ask me fairly often what paint I use to get the glow. The disappointing answer is that it is ordinary paint. Nothing in my work is fluorescent, nothing is metallic, and there is no clever medium involved.

Glow is not a pigment. It is a relationship between one color and everything you put around it. Once you know the moves, you can make a completely normal pink look like it is lit from inside.

1. Glow is relative, so build the neighbourhood first

A bright color on its own is just a bright color. It only starts reading as light when the things around it are duller and darker. This is why neon signs do nothing in daylight and everything at night.

Practically: before you worry about your brightest color, decide what it will sit against. If your entire painting is high key and bright, nothing in it can glow, because there is no contrast left to spend.

2. Mix your darks from color, never from black

This is the single biggest one. If you surround a glowing pink with black out of the tube, the pink looks stuck on top of a hole. If you surround it with a deep plum, a blue green, a very dark warm brown, the whole area still has color in it and the pink looks like it is lighting its surroundings.

Mix darks from complementary pairs instead: red with green, orange with blue, yellow with purple. You get darks that stay alive.

3. Save your highest saturation for a small area

Glow is small. A face lit by a phone screen is mostly dark with a bit of light on it, not the other way round.

If every square centimetre is at full saturation, the eye has nowhere to land and the painting reads as loud rather than lit. I use a lot of color, but the truly maximum chroma in any piece is usually a small percentage of the surface. Everything else is a step down from it.

4. Put a mid step between the glow and the dark

Light falls off gradually. If your bright yellow sits directly against your darkest dark with nothing in between, it reads as a sticker.

Add one or two intermediate steps, usually a slightly darker and slightly less saturated version of the glow color itself. Yellow to warm orange to deep red brown to dark. That transition is what your brain interprets as light spilling outward.

In Bad Signal, Good Transition the whole room is pink, but it is about five different pinks in a ladder from nearly white to a dusty red brown. That ladder is the glow. One flat pink would just have been a pink wall.

5. Use temperature contrast, not just value contrast

Warm light reads brightest against cool shadow, and cool light reads brightest against warm shadow. Pushing your darks slightly cooler and slightly bluer while keeping your glow warm gives you a second layer of contrast for free, on top of the light and dark difference.

It is also why the pink and cyan combination is such a cliche in neon imagery. It is doing two jobs at once.

6. Soften one edge

Hard edges everywhere make things look like objects. A slightly softer edge where the bright shape meets the dark reads as light bleeding, which is exactly what real glow does.

You do not need much. One or two soft transitions in an otherwise crisp painting will do more than blurring everything.

7. Check it in greyscale

Take a photo and desaturate it on your phone. If your glowing area is not clearly the lightest thing in its part of the image, it will never glow, no matter how saturated the color is.

Saturation cannot rescue a value problem. This is the test that catches almost everything, and it takes ten seconds.

8. Let the surface do some work

This one is specific to how I paint, but it matters. A glossy finish reflects actual light, so the piece changes as you move past it and the brights genuinely catch. It is a small physical amount of extra glow on top of the painted illusion, and it is part of why the originals look different in person than on a screen. I go through my whole process in My Candy Decay Art Process.

The three mistakes I see most often

• Black shadows. Instant flatness. Use chromatic darks instead.
• Everything at maximum. If it is all bright, none of it is bright. Something has to be quiet.
• Relying on the pigment. Buying a fluorescent tube of paint does not fix a value structure. The glow comes from what surrounds it.

If you want the full colour system

This article is the short practical version. If you want to build a palette that does this reliably instead of by accident, that is what my Candy Decay guides are for, and How to Develop Your Own Color Style is a good free starting point.

And if you would rather just look at the results than paint them, the hand-signed prints are all in this colour logic, signed by hand for 35 euro.