In the early days of the pandemic, I found myself living alone in my sister’s house. She’s a single parent, and she and her son were staying with our parents to have more convenient childcare access. I decided since I had the house to myself, which was a treat for me, that I would paint a door for her son’s room. We’d bought the blank door some time earlier, I think the one that came with the house… didn’t? Not quite sure I remember. Anyway, I had access to a door and I wanted to paint it, and this seemed like a good excuse.

The main elements for the door became a hillside with some fortresses, clouds, and a flying three-headed dragon (Zmei Gorinich from Slavic folklore). My intention was that the bottom few inches of the door, which I assumed would get scuffed and kicked, would be pure green for easier patching, and that as my nephew grew taller he’d discover more of the elements of the design. The top would be clouds and a sun, to round out the scene and because all children’s drawings of the outside should have a sun in them and I wanted to mirror that.

My favorite part, though, the part that I really wanted to include almost above all else, was the glow-in-the-dark sun and clouds. The clouds would stay clouds, just glowing, but the pièce de résistance would be the sun that turned into a moon at night.

Here’s the completed door, before installation, and then process photos, fuller-length photos, and descriptions will follow (read on specifically for materials and techniques).

Different angle of the same door, covering more of the bottom portion.
Different angle of the same door, covering more of the top portion.

Sketching was just pencil on the blank door. The door was standard from Home Depot, it didn’t have a huge shine on it but wasn’t fully matte either. It made a good base layer, pencil went on clean. I specifically knew I was going to do black line work, to minimize the amount that the pencil lines shone through the paint layers with the lighter colors. This was a relatively rough sketch that involved a lot of sweeping line work.

Upper half of a sketch for the painting above - clouds, sun, hills, fortresses, dragon.
Quarter-side angle of the same upper half door.

Regular Sharpie pens ended up being the winner for most of the line work, with some detailing being done in ultra-fine (the ones with the squared-off caps). I did run into the issue where the Sharpies would dry up eventually, but I had access to a lot of free Sharpies and no free other kinds of markers, so it worked out for me. If I were trying to make them last longer in the future in this application, I’d probably try rotating several pens and resting the tips in a wet paper towel or something when they weren’t in use.

I used the first paint layer to experiment with consistency. Craft acrylics seemed like the best medium, avoiding the smell and maintenance of oils while not requiring the sheer number of watercolor layers I imagine would come with a project like this in watercolors. I used craft acrylics (craftstmart, americana, folkart, the small tube stuff you can buy at Michael’s or Joann).. They were cheap enough to get multiple colors and coat multiple layers, easy to clean off surfaces they shouldn’t be on, and provided good coverage as opposed to the thinner sign painting type craft paints.

This is the first layer or two of blue, it ended up being around 4-5 layers of the main colors, 3 or so of the white for the clouds, and an order of magnitude more of the glow-in-the-dark, which I layered over the white in the clouds and the gold in the sun. I think I could have gotten away with painting the clouds with just the glow-in-the-dark, but I liked the textured effect of the white paint underneath.

For brushes, I used 1” foam for a lot of the larger bits, because 1” foam brushes are cheap and plentiful. For some of the finer detailing, I’d end up using normal paintbrushes.

Same door, line work done in Sharpie, first layer or two of sky blue paint added to the sky, the rest is not colored yet.

From there, it was a lot of paint, re-line, repaint. The only place where I really color-mixed was on the dragon wings, the fade from yellow to orange to red. I figured the child-friendliness of the door was improved with static colors, and I also didn’t really want to guess how much to mix. As it was, there were colors that didn’t go on super well and I ended up painting over them with different shades.

Close-up of a small fortress (2-4") on a hill, the fortress is colored grey and the paint covers up the lines.
Close-up of dragon. It has three heads and is red with a yellowish belly and two wings.
Close-up of two clouds. They are slightly textured from having many layers of glow-in-the-dark paint added over top.
Close-up of a different cloud, similarly textured.

In the end I really liked how it turned out. I didn’t do a clear coat, my sister I think tried a bit along the bottom but found it looked weird. It’s easy enough to touch up the bottom edge when it gets too dinged up, since at that point there’s not even much line work to worry about.

Another angle of the same full-length door, vertical.
Full-length image of the door lying down

The glow-in-the-dark looked pretty cool, and I definitely do not regret putting in that detail, but logistically it was a bit of a hassle. It took something like seventeen or eighteen coats of glow-in-the-dark, to the point where I think I had two small and one large bottle of paint. The coverage was textured, I ended up smoothing it out with one of those plastic smoothing tools you can get at Blick and even then it wasn’t that smooth, since that was over eight or nine dried layers already.

I do love the effect. The clouds stay clouds, but by not painting the sun rays or several spots inside the sun, the sun turns into a moon. It takes a couple seconds to charge, and as all glow-in-the-dark it tends to charge better under blacklight. The door faces out into the hallway so I’m not sure what the point was, but it looks cool and I like it.

Page last updated 13 Apr. 2023