Phosphorescent paints, pigments and pebbles that charge via sunlight by day and glow after dark transform the nighttime urban landscape, illuminating murals, bike paths, skate parks, rivers and even live snails. It’s like taking the glow-in-the-dark stickers you plastered all over everything as a kid out into the real world and achieving similar effects on a satisfyingly large scale, hiding secrets all over the city that will be revealed when the sun goes down.

3 Glow-in-the-Dark Street Art Murals by Reskate

When the sun goes down, hand puppets, knives and space helmets appear within a rabbit, a planet and a loaf of bread. Spanish creative studio Reskate used glow-in-the-dark paint to hide these unexpected figures within their silhouetted murals.

Glow in the Dark Bike Path in the Netherlands

This bike path is safer after dark thanks to small particles of phosphor called ‘luminosphores’ that charge up during the day and release light at night. Urban planners in Lidzbark Warminski, Poland took inspiration from a similar project by Studio Roosegaarde in the Netherlands, but wanted to use a zero-energy light source instead of solar-powered LEDs.

Phosphorescent Mural by SpY, Paris

Blending into the pale brick on the side of a Paris building by day, this mural by SpY reveals its secrets at night, blaring ‘I AM NOT A REAL ARTIST.’

Snail Swarm Enhanced with LED Lights & UV Paint

Researching snails can be kind of dry, so a group of researchers from the Ecology department at the University of Exeter found a more fun – and visually dazzling – way to go about it. The team tagged hundreds of live snails with LED lights and UV paint, and then tracked their patterns of movement at night. The experiment is an effort to track how snails spread lungworm to dogs.

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Glow In The Dark Outdoor Art 15 Designs That Come Alive At Night

Street artists are using simple glowsticks to produce an amazing variety of light art and graffiti. These tags, comics, creatures and shapes fade as fast as they appear, unless they is captured by time-lapse photography. Like traditional graffiti and street art, light art comes in many forms. Unlike most graffiti, however, there is no one to complain about being tagged!

Tags: Of course, an easy and straightforward form of light art is tagging. Glowsticks can be used to trace letters, and muscle memory takes over to create these shapes.

Cartoons: Creating light art cartoons is a little more tricky, and also brings more creativity into place. The above image (right) shows a clever integration of the figure with its context.

Creatures: Light art can also be used to animate or give life to inanimate urban objects, from garbage cans to post office boxes. Since the light fades right away, only those who see the photos get a glimpse of the secret life of these light art creatures.

Shapes: Light art shapes require particular attention to camera view and alignment. Pulled off right, though, they can highlight, reinforce or interpret an urban space in simple but powerful ways.

Other: Of course, the sky is the limit. The above image cleverly integrates the artist into the scene – he seems to be playing a game with his pet monster. Light art is easy to start experimenting with – disposable glow sticks that last for hours are only a few dollars.