My photography partners and I are starting a new publication in the area of fluorescent art called “The Black Light Magazine“. This project is exciting, because the area is new, both in general and for me personally. One experiment that I tried recently is digital re-creation of a fluorescent painting effect.
The photographed fluorescent paint or makeup has substantially higher brightness levels, compared to the areas of the image that are not painted. Also, the transitions from bright areas to the dark ones are abrupt. In other words, the tonal contrast is high, but only at the edges of the painted patterns. Inside the non-fluorescent, dark regions and within the the bright paint strokes, there is no significant variation of the brightness levels (i.e. the tonal contrast is low).
In terms of colour, popular fluorescent pigments are “neon” variations of yellow, red and green and their derivatives (shades of orange and yellow-green). The fluorescence effect is based on the pigment material absorbing the light energy at a certain wavelength (e.g. In the UV range, which is invisible to human eye) and releasing it at a different (visible) wavelength. The fluorescent light has a narrow band of frequencies, meaning that there is almost no variation in the color within an individual brush stroke.
Ability to digitally reproduce the glow-in-the-dark effect would be useful from creative perspective, because there are certain types of photographs, where UV lighting (or fluorescent painting, for that matter) would not be practical to implement. For my experiment, I used one of my favorite rugby shots as a reference and sketched over it, sampling the colors from a studio photo of a model in fluorescent makeup shot under UV light. I did the sketch in the ProCreate app on an iPad. For more refined painting in the future, I plan to work on tweaking the brush dynamics (which is better accomplished in Photoshop) to make the individual strokes more “alive”, i.e. varying in thickness and possibly transparency (although current fluorescent paint do not show a lot of transparency variation) along their length.
