I have been wanting to make some ghosts for a while to inhabit my antique church. My church is a little on the rough side, so making it a bit haunted seems reasonable (without, of course, altering or damaging my church in any way). Anyway, this is a solution I really like.
I started looking for clear glass figurines, and finally settled on a nativity set.
These figures will fit well in my church, as they are about the right scale for the building, and also they look holy. I decided that, for my purposes, I wanted them to glow by themselves instead of having them elevated by sitting on candles. The candles would work fine if I had them in different settings, but I like using glow-in-the-dark paint.
The glow-in-the-dark paint I use is just a run of the mill crafting paint that can be found in the paint aisle of many craft supply stores. There are different brands and probably any brand will work. I bought mine from Walmart. I also used a darker paint for shadows; I believe I used payne’s gray acrylic.
I watered down the payne’s gray and put layers of paint in areas I want to be shaded, just to add more definition to the form, because otherwise the clear glass makes it hard to make out details. After the shadows, I put on thicker layers of the glowing paint in the raised areas like the head and hands, shoulders, sleeves, etc.
In order to make the figure glow, you need to hold it under a light, shine a flashlight on it, or just keep it in a well-lit place for a while to ‘charge’ it. The glow won’t last for very long before it needs recharging with a light source, but it is still fun.
