A pleasant surprise when the lights go off

I love visiting my friends and loosing myself in the pictures and paintings on their walls. In some houses, you can tell they have just hung anything to add a little color or to break the monotony of the wall. In other homes, the most personal and important moments of life, captured in photos hang amongst vibrant paintings and artworks that you can tell were made with sweat and tears. Others are just plain walls. With nothing to show and nothing to hide. And of course knowing my friends, these decor characteristics usually match their personalities. But all of these needed light to be appreciated. And that gave us an idea.

With a few simple materials, we decided to make a glow in the dark artwork that would be visible even when the lights were off.

First we gathered the basis of our idea. Some plastic adhesive letters, some sturdy cardboard, an old picture frame. The letters don’t need to be plastic. they could be thin  wood or another light weight material. But it is important that they are white or primed white before spraying with Montana NIGHTGLOW. Then we looked in our artbox and fished out the new Montana NIGHTGLOW Orange and the original Green. A Montana GOLD can in blue and a can of Montana PLASTIC PRIMER spray. If you don’t have any of these go visit your local Montana Cans reseller and stock up.

After we had our mask and gloves on, we started with our Montana PLASTIC PRIMER spray and primed our plastic letters on the non adhesive side. They were already white, but if your letters are not, you can first prime yours with Montana GOLD in the color shock white. Once dry, we then applied the Montana NIGHTGLOW in the color Orange.

The more coats you apply, the better it glows when the lights are off. We did 3 – 4 thin even coats that we applied over our drop sheet, at a distance of 15cm – 20cm from the letters. We changed the nozzles from an orange dot fat cap, to the Montana FLAT JET CAP medium.

This enabled us to angle in on the sides of all the letters. It is also generally a nice cap to use when you want to apply paint evenly. Of course we remembered to shake all the cans for 2-3 minutes, turn them upside down and remove the nozzle allowing the black safety ring to fall out before starting.

While the letters were drying, we grabbed our sturdy sheet of cardboard and painted it in a vibrant Montana GOLD blue color. You could use any color you want. We chose blue as it is complimentary to the NIGHTGLOW orange. And because it looked sharp within the frame. We left all this dry over night and went and opened a bottle of Prosecco to welcome in the evening.

The next day we put it all together. We peeled the adhesive covering off the back of our letters and applied them as desired to our cardboard painted sheet which we had already cut to size. If your letters are not self adhesive, you could use glue or double sided tape. Then it was show time.

We hung the work in daylight and later had the lights off in the room. As soon as it got dark we turned the lights off and BOOM! Glow in the dark goodness. We liked it so much we even made a second one with Montana NIGHTGLOW green. All we need to do now is to invite some people over at night to surprise them. Happy Crafting!