Spray Painting & Airbrushing is a wonderful art that requires a graceful hand and great technique to get a good result. Hours of practice go into just learning the art of mastering brush strokes. Use of the trigger combined with the distance of the brush is very hard to get the hang of. But if you have ever watched a talented airbrush artist you will be amazed at what they can create. It is to those artists this article is directed. I suggest you try to make your art Glow!
Glow in the dark powders have been around a while. The zinc sulfide type was developed way back in the early 1800's. These are still cool, but the longevity of glow is only around a half an hour at best. Within the last twenty years, glow in the dark powders have come a long way. A compound called Strontium Aluminate was developed and scientist added an activator called Europium and bang! You have a substance that glows up to 13 hours. I will not go into the details of how it stores and releases energy here, but I do want to cover how it works in an airbrush.
Glow in the dark powders come in 8 different colors. Red, White, Blue, Teal, Violet, Green, Yellow, and Orange. The yellow and orange are a yellow-green with added dyes to make them glow yellow or orange. The rest are their true colors. They can have many different daytime colors. The red, purple, blue, are white in the day light. The green and teal are an off white with a slight yellow green tint. The orange and yellow have like colors in the daytime. The white has a daytime color of white. These colors can differ from suppliers, and the colors listed are those of Glonation.com.
Glow times are 12 hours for the green, 8 to 10 for the teal and blue, 4 for purple yellow and orange. The red is half an hour and the white is around 10 minutes.
The powders also come in different mesh or grain sizes. For Spray Painting & Airbrushing I highly suggest using the finest mesh glow in the dark powder available. See the chart below.
· Smallest size 12-25 micron
· Medium size 25-55 micron
· Large size 55-100 micron
You will also get varying degrees of glow time from your glow paint depending on the size of the particles. The smaller the size, the less the glow time. But adding layers enhances the glow intensity.
This is the tricky part of Spray Painting & Airbrushing with glow in the dark powder; because it is grainy, it tends to clog the brush more often than just using airbrush paint.