Painting Stars in Your Child’s Bedroom
I’ve never had so much fun. I brought home a quart of the Benjamin Moore Glow in the Dark Paint to make a starry sky for my daughters’ bedroom. The paint glows in the dark just like any glow-in-the-dark toy, except it is paint.
I couldn’t wait to get started and jumped right in. What I didn’t realize was how thick you have to make the paint in order to get a decent glow. I first started by trying to “flick” the paint from my paint brush to create stars. This didn’t work so well overall, but made a fantastic “milky way” across the center. It took me several hours of flicking in order to build it up enough for it to show a decent glow. (as an aside, the t-shirt I was wearing is still glown in the dark to this day)
But being the imaginative guy I tell my wife I am, I knew there had to be a better way. How can I get this paint thick enough, and still be able to create the designs I want?
The answer came in the form of an empty squeeze ketchup bottle (the old style red ones). You fill the bottle with paint, and squeeze it out the top. It comes out in a fairly fine stream, and you can apply it thick. The trick is to put just enough so it doesn’t drip.
This tool worked amazingly well. I created asteroids, quasars, comets, planets, moons and stars. My favorites were the comets because getting the stream to tail off took some practice but looked awesome. My next favorite was the little star. You just squeeze a dot onto the ceiling, enough so there is a drip, but it doesn’t fall.
I then filled in the background with a bunch of flicking and now we have a fantastic galaxy. The coolest part is that you can barely see it when the lights are on, because the paint is fairly translucent. My girls love it.
I did something similar when I painted a quiet room in an adolescent psychiatric hospital. I first painted the whole room a really deep blue. The room had some regular plaster walls, one tile wall, and some strange wood-laminate strips that looked like they had held shelves at one point. I just painted all of it with several coats of blue. (And yes, the Zinsser primers you mentioned are great for sticking paint to things like tile and fake wood!) The stars went all over the ceiling and then about a quarter of the way down the walls, getting thinner as they went down the wall.
Since this was a very large area, I cheated a bit and used a rubber stamp for my stars. It was a one-inch star-shaped stamp, available just about anywhere that has stamps. Given that it was an awful space I had to work with, I went with the archetypal stars rather than trying to paint constellations or anything. I first stamped silver ink onto the walls (I wanted the stars to be visible in any light), then stamped over it with your glow-in-the-dark paint. After it dried, I sprayed a thin coat of art fixative over the stars, let that dry, then rolled over the whole thing with several coats of polyacrylic. The glow-in-the-dark paint is fabulous stuff! As you mentioned, it’s almost clear, so the stars looked silver in normal light and glowy in dim light.
Thank you for your comments Eeka. We actually painted the ceiling a deep blue first, too. And we put the glow-in-the-dark paint on so thick that you can see it when the lights are on, but the glow is fantastic when we turn the lights out. So much fun… These are the things that make being a Dad so great.