Glow Art and Aura Painting: How to Paint Glowing Light in Acrylic and Oil

This "Glow Technique" Will Make Your Art Magical (Oil Painting Demo) 1:02:55

To paint a glow, start with the dark around the light. Lay a soft, blurry halo of color wet into wet, let it dry, then step in closer with brighter, more saturated color, and save your brightest white for one small spot at the very end. That order is what makes paint look like it’s giving off light. You don’t need special paint for it, and once you’ve done it a few times you’ll use it for halos, candles, moons, sunsets and auras alike.

A glowing light or a soft aura can turn an ordinary painting into one that feels alive. It pulls the eye and gives a scene an otherworldly quality, whether you’re painting a luminous figure, a sky at sunset or pure abstract energy. Here’s how it works, step by step, in acrylic and in oil.

What is glow art?

Glow art is a painting where light seems to come off the surface: a halo, a lit window, a candle, a moon, an aura around a figure. Most of the time the glow is an illusion built with paint, using contrast, soft edges and one very bright spot. The phrase also covers art made with glow-in-the-dark or fluorescent paint, which literally lights up under a black light or after it’s been charged in bright light.

The two are worth keeping apart. The painted glow is a skill, and it works in any medium, in daylight, on a phone screen and in a print. Glow-in-the-dark paint is a material you add on top, and it only does its trick when the room goes dark. This guide teaches the skill first, then shows where the specialty paints help.

What is the aura effect in painting?

An aura is the soft light that seems to radiate from a figure, object or area of a composition. It often carries symbolic weight as well as light. From the gold halos in Renaissance altarpieces to the energy fields around figures in contemporary paintings, artists have used the aura to signal holiness, vitality or emotional intensity.

Technically an aura is the same thing as any other painted glow. A halo around a head, a candle flame and a neon sign all use the same moves, and the difference between them is mostly the color and the shape. In one of our Art Club lessons on light and mood, the instructor points to the glowing moons, stars, halos and fireflies in Elli’s paintings, light that pierces a dark background and gives the figures a heavenly feel. Every one of those is built the way this guide describes.

Why does a glow start with the dark around it?

A glow starts with the dark because light only looks bright next to something darker. Your eye judges brightness by comparison, so a bright spot on a pale background reads as a pale shape, and the same spot on a deep background reads as light.

That’s why, when a student asked how the glowing light in a portrait was painted during our two-day oil workshop, Elli’s first instruction was to ignore the shiny spot. Don’t get seduced by the little bright highlight, she said. Look first for the color that’s furthest from the glow, the deep red and the dark purple where the light fades into the background, and paint those transitions first. Dimitra says the same thing about fire in her Art Club lesson: if you want flames to stand out, you need a dark background behind them.

It works in watercolor too, even though you can’t add white there. In one of our critique workshops, the advice for a figure that wanted to look backlit and glowing was to make the darks darker, because in watercolor the only way to make a highlight look brighter is to deepen everything around it.

How do you paint a glowing light effect, step by step?

Work from the outside in, and from soft to sharp. This is how Elli built the glow in a portrait across the two days of that oil workshop, and the same order works in acrylic.

1. Paint the surroundings first. Lay in the dark background and the deepest color where the light fades out. If your background is light, the glow has nothing to push against.
2. Lay a soft, blurry halo wet into wet. Brush the first glow color into the wet background so the edge melts. Elli described this first pass as a diffused, blurry, soft edge, and dry-brushed a cool color over the outer part of it.
3. Let it dry. This is the step people skip. Elli set the glow up one day so she could finish it the next, because the brighter layers need a dry surface to sit on. Plan on at least two layers, with drying time between them.
4. Move in closer with brighter, more saturated color. Once it’s dry, paint a smaller area of brighter color inside the first one. Plant the brush at the light source and pull the stroke outward, so it fades into the cooler color around it. For the brightest orange red, she used the paint straight from the tube.
5. Put the warm in front and the cool behind. Warm color comes forward and cool color sits back, so the parts of the glow that should feel close to you get warmer, and the haze behind them stays cool.
6. Save the brightest white for last. Work toward the center and keep pure white for one small spot at the very core, at the end. Elli used brilliant white more or less straight from the tube, mixing it toward a warm white only now and then.
7. Soften the edges with a clean, dry brush. With no paint on the brush, move the wet paint around until the transition is smooth. As she put it while blending, a glow is all about the soft edges.

The order matters more than the colors. A crisp edge tells the eye “this is an object,” and a soft edge tells it “this is light.” A bright color spread everywhere reads as a colored shape; the same color saved for one spot reads as a source.

How do you paint a glow in acrylic when it dries so fast?

In acrylic, build the glow in thin transparent layers from light to dark, then come back with opaque highlights at the end. Acrylic dries in minutes and dries slightly darker than it looks wet, so you can’t push soft blends around the way you can in oil.

Dimitra’s sunset masterclass shows a clean way to do it. She paints on watercolor paper with thin, transparent washes and lets the white of the paper glow through them, building up the color slowly instead of starting with darks that would overpower the light. Then she works the clouds dark to light, so when the highlight goes on top it pops forward. For the sun’s white glow spreading across the sky, she layers the white several times to get it bright enough, because each pass dries a little darker, and softly blends the edges of the last pass into the painting so the glow stays soft.

If you love the look of an oil glow, you can split the job. In the oil workshop, Elli said she doesn’t think acrylic can give quite the same depth, which is why our instructors often start a painting in acrylic and finish the glowing passages in oil, where the paint stays wet long enough to blend.

How do you paint a glowing fire or candle flame?

Paint fire over a dark background and work dark to light, the same as any glow. In her Art Club lesson on painting fire, Dimitra maps out the flames with a marker, puts a bright fluorescent color in the underpainting with spray paint, then glazes acrylic and oil over it. You don’t have to use fluorescents, she says, but glazing over a very bright base makes the flames stand out even more. Fluorescent acrylics or fluorescent markers do the same job if you don’t have spray paint.

For a candle, the brightest point is usually just above the wick, with warmer, darker color toward the tips and edges of the flame, and a soft halo of warm light on whatever sits around it.

How do you check whether your glow is working?

Squint at it. Squinting blurs the detail and shows you the values, so you can see whether anything in the painting reaches the very lightest light. In one of our critique workshops, a student’s portrait had hair that clearly wanted to glow, and the fix was simple: rating the values from one to ten, it needed a few strokes of radiant white at the brightest end, the way the stronger painting beside it had.

Run three checks:

• Is there one brightest spot? If the whole light area is the same brightness, nothing reads as the source.
• Are the surroundings dark enough? If the glow sits on a mid-tone, darken around it before you brighten it.
• Are the edges soft? Any hard outline around the light turns it back into a shape.

How do glow-in-the-dark, iridescent and glitter paints add to a glow?

Specialty paints add shimmer on top of a glow you’ve already painted. They don’t build the glow on their own, so use them as accents.

1. Glow-in-the-dark (phosphorescent) paint. It absorbs light and gives it off in the dark, so it’s the only paint that literally glows. Put thin layers over the brightest areas, such as a moon, a candle or the core of an aura, and keep dark tones around them. It shows up best over a white or very light base, and in daylight it reads only faintly, so your painted glow still has to carry the painting.
2. Fluorescent paint. It looks extra vivid in daylight and lights up under a black light. Used as an underpainting with a transparent glaze over it, as in Dimitra’s fire lesson, it makes a light source burn brighter.
3. Iridescent paint. It shifts as the viewer moves. A few touches at the edge of an aura, or an iridescent layer under a transparent glaze, suggest movement and energy. In one of our live workshops, a transparent iridescent purple brushed over gray drips turned them into a glowing, shifting color in a single pass.
4. Glitter paint. It sparkles, which suits celestial and abstract pieces. A little around a light source goes a long way.

The rule with all four is restraint. Put them only where light would naturally radiate, and build the painted glow first. For more effects to combine with these, our guide to painting techniques covers thirty five of them.

How have artists painted glowing light throughout history?

Painters have chased glowing light for centuries, and every era used the same contrast and soft transitions you’re practicing now.

1. Renaissance halos. Painters like Giotto and Fra Angelico used gold leaf and soft gradients to ring divine figures with light. You can see where that visual language started in our piece on Giotto.
2. Baroque drama. Caravaggio and Rembrandt mastered chiaroscuro, intense light against deep dark, so their light sources seem to glow from within the canvas. The mechanics are broken down in Caravaggio’s lighting technique.
3. Impressionist light. Monet, Renoir and their peers chased the glow of sunlight and atmosphere outdoors, painting light as color instead of as white.
4. The painter of light. Thomas Kinkade became known as “the painter of light” for cottages and windows that glow against dusk and snow, a nostalgic warmth built almost entirely on lit windows against cool, dark surroundings.
5. Contemporary auras. Many painters today use bold color and abstract shapes to build energy fields around figures, blending spirituality with personal expression.

The chiaroscuro that makes a Caravaggio glow is the same principle as the dark ground that makes your candle look lit. If you want to go deeper on that idea, our guide to painting dark to light explains why so many painters build every painting this way.

Bring the glow into your own paintings

Once you can paint a glow, you’ll find uses for it everywhere: a moon in a night sky, a lamp in a window, a halo of light around someone you love. Start with one small study this week. Paint a dark ground, lay a blurry halo wet into wet, let it dry, step in closer with brighter color, and finish with one dot of white. The right brushes for acrylic painting make those soft transitions far easier.

If you’d like to paint alongside us instead of on your own, our Two Week Challenge puts a brush in your hand with guided lessons you can follow at your own pace. When you want to keep building technique, the rest of our oil painting techniques collection is here.

Frequently asked questions

How do you paint a glowing light effect in acrylic?

Paint the dark around the light first, then lay a soft halo of color that fades outward. Let it dry, step in closer with brighter color, and finish with one small spot of white. Acrylic dries a little darker than it looks wet, so plan on two or three passes of white, and soften its edge into the paint around it while it's still wet.

What is glow art?

Glow art means two different things. Most often it's a painting where light seems to come off the surface, built with contrast, soft edges and a bright center. It can also mean art made with glow-in-the-dark or fluorescent paint that literally lights up under a black light or after charging. The first is a painting skill; the second is a material you add on top.

What is the aura effect in painting?

An aura is the soft light that seems to radiate from a figure or object, like a halo around a head or energy around a body. It's built the same way as any painted glow: a dark surrounding, a blurry halo of color, brighter color closer to the source, and the brightest note last.

Why doesn't my glow look like it's glowing?

Usually the surroundings aren't dark enough, the edges are too crisp, or the bright color is spread everywhere instead of saved for one spot. Squint at the painting. If nothing reaches the very lightest value, or the light area has a hard outline, it will read as a flat shape of color instead of light.

Is oil or acrylic better for painting a glow?

Oil is easier, because it stays wet long enough to blend a soft edge with a clean dry brush. Acrylic dries fast and slightly darker, so you build the glow in thin transparent layers and repeat the brightest notes. Many of our instructors lay the first layers in acrylic and finish the glow in oil.

Do you need glow-in-the-dark paint to paint a glow?

No. A convincing glow comes from value contrast and soft edges, which you can paint with any ordinary acrylic or oil. Glow-in-the-dark and fluorescent paints are extras. Fluorescent color under a transparent glaze makes a fire or neon light extra vivid, and phosphorescent paint adds a literal glow once the lights go off.