Glow Up: UV Reactive Art
Give your photos a night mode.
Create bold artwork with a hidden second life. Using high-contrast imagery and UV-reactive color, participants build a piece that looks striking in normal light—then completely changes when the blacklights come on.
At a Glance
Difficulty: Beginner
Age Range: All Ages
Time: 60–90 minutes
Format: Guided Art Bar
Adaptability: Adaptable for most ages, skill levels, and abilities
Setting: Indoors
What You’ll Make
Participants create their own UV-reactive artwork using bold imagery, vivid color, and glowing details.
Start with one of the prepared Rusted Rose images, find something that catches your eye in one of our magazines, or bring an image of your own. Old posters, old calendar images, photographs, portraits, illustrations, album art, and other high-contrast images can all become the starting point for something completely new.
The goal isn’t to perfectly recreate the original. It’s to use it as a foundation, then transform it with color, contrast, and UV-reactive details until the finished piece feels entirely your own.
What to Expect
We’ll explore how to pull shapes, shadows, highlights, and interesting details from an existing image, then use UV-reactive materials to exaggerate, remix, and transform it.
This is a Guided Art Bar, so instruction and examples are available without everyone having to create the same thing. Pick from the provided imagery, hunt through magazines for inspiration, or bring something meaningful, strange, nostalgic, or just plain cool from home.
Then we turn on the blacklights and see what happens.
Why Pick This Workshop?
Choose Glow Up for the reveal.
Participants get to create something that works as artwork in normal lighting, then watch it transform when exposed to blacklight. It’s colorful, highly customizable, beginner-friendly, and just unusual enough to make people want to turn the lights off and see what happens.
Good to Know
Blacklight is an important part of the experience and is used throughout the workshop to test UV-reactive colors and see how the artwork changes.
The project can be simplified or expanded depending on the age, experience, and needs of the group.
Bonus: Each participant gets a UV pen with a built-in blacklight to take home, so you can keep experimenting with hidden messages, glowing details, and UV-reactive art after the workshop.
Great For
Kids · Teens · Adults · Families · Mixed-Age Groups · Private Parties · Community Groups · Creative Groups
